Swimming with Billy

Last Saturday was interesting - I swum in my first ever kid's club meet! For reasons I won't bore you with I got asked to be part of the "Open" section for the Buxton team in their first Crusader meet of the year. The Crusader league is a small two division league for "midlands" (ish) based clubs, and Buxton are in division 2.

Now I only started entering masters comps last year, so it was interesting to see "grass roots" competition first hand. It was also nice to see a number of the young kids I periodically help teach (and I think it helps re-inforce the swimmer-coach bond for them to see me swimming and taking it seriously). And it's scary being definitely the oldest swimmer there! I think our male open team were aged: 39, 33, 26 and 17 - well it's an open competition.

I was entered in the 4 x 50M medlay relay, the 4 x 50M free relay and the last (proper) event the 100 fly. In the relays I swum the freestyle legs (anchored the medlay, and lead the free). I really enjoyed it and swam the best I've done this year:

28.6 is 2+ seconds quicker than anything else this year and 1:10.3 is a PB by 3 seconds

Okay, okay, so I've gotten into a really bad habit of not keeping the postings going (and looking at how the work thing's going, that looks like it'll continue for a while...). I meant to post this during the Xmas break but didn't (and so much for New Year resolutions).

Last year, in swimming terms, was a good year. No, wait, it was a really good year. I swam my first ever proper swim meets and am now a veteran of four such events. I also have really belatedly decided to give "sprinting" a go. Now for year's I have shyed away from sprints deciding that I simply wasn't and never would be fast enough. I would use the argument that my TI-based style wasn't suited for speed. Sure I could hold my own with the normal mature swimmers and certainly when compared to your average triathlete, but that's my limit. I also argued that I was a much better long distance swimmer.

Well 2007 kind of turned that on its head slightly. If/when you enter Masters meets, there aren't that many longer distance events on the program. After sitting through a number of long 400M at one event it dawned on me just why - the time to run such events is a real killer. Now I'd prefer to see more of them but I can understand that running a couple of events where each race takes 8 - 10 minutes really mounts up - that's saying nothing against those (generally older) swimmers who take that long. Good on them for doing it, and I want to when I get older. It's just that the practicalities of event running means there are less 400+ events (even 200+ events) in the regular calendar.

So given those constraints and the fact I want to enter Masters events - it's shorter distance events, which means "sprints". Now sprinting is an emotive term that I am still coming to grips with. Pre-2007 I said (if asked) that sub-30s was the goal of a 50M freestyle swimmer if he/she wanted to call themselves fast. Now I look back on the preceding year and am now "comfortably" sub-30s I am re-evaluating that statement. I still think sub-30s is fast, but real speed is 26s and below - that's the big drop to _real_ club swimmers.

But I am comfortable with my current standard and it sets me up nicely for the coming year.

So ladies and gentlemen. The scores on the doors for last year are as follows:

Male: 35-39 Age Group

Male: All age groups