English Bay Meet Report

This past weekend was the English Bay Swim Club "Love to Swim" Competition at the UBC Aquatic Centre. I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of my swims. My training had been going fairly well despite some personal setbacks in January that I'm still trying to resolve. I went into this meet with out any pressure or strong expectations on myself. I was just wanting to go in and have fun and see how I swam. If I swam great, that was good. If not, there was always next time.
Well, my strategy seemed to work as I had an excellent meet! My teammate Joe and I arrived at the pool a little ahead of time and did some stretching. I decided to go in and warmup right away because I knew that my first race would be coming up soon and I wanted to warm up adequately yet give myself enough time to rest between the warmup and the race. I swam about 800-900 metres in warmup and everything felt pretty good. So, I was fairly satisfied.


My first race was the 400m freestyle which was the first event of the session. I was racing one of my teammates Ian who was doing 400IM instead of 400 free. I thought that there was a good chance that he would beat me doing IM since he is really fast. We got up on the blocks and the gun went off. I dove into the water and started swimming. My strategy was to take it out quite easy the first 200m and then really crank the third 100 and bring it home the last 100 with whatever I had left. I swam the first 50 or 100 metres and I could see Ian quite a ways ahead of me after the butterfly portion of the IM. I was expecting this and it didn't really bother me in the least. The 2nd 100 I started to build a little bit but I didn't really give it yet. I could see that I was starting to catch Ian when he was doing backstroke.
On the 3rd 100, I really gave her and passed Ian while he was doing breaststroke. At about 300m, I started to get tired but I just held on the last 100m and then touched the wall. My time was 5:30.03. I was pretty tired but quite satisfied with my time. The best part was that I was able to negative split it like I wanted to. My first 200m was 2:45.8 and my second 200m was 2:44.2.

My next race which was soon afterwards was 50m breaststroke. This was my joke race as I didn't really care or even have a goal time in mind. I swam it and was fairly pleasantly surprised. I did a 41.13 which was definitely faster than I was expecting. I think a lot of people on my team were surprised by that too especially since I am known as not being a breaststroker.

My 3rd race of the day was my signature race - 200m backstroke. I was swimming next to my teammate Scott who is an excellent backstroker. He's been swimming quite well lately and I fully expected him to be way out in front during the race. Well, when it came time to race, it didn't turn out that way at all. The first 50m I was actually ahead of him but then he caught up and we were pretty much neck and neck the entire way. I started to tire on the 3rd 50 and he passed me by a little bit but then I could see that we were pretty close on the last lap and so I gave it my all. In the end, Scott beat me out to the wall by about half a second but I was quite satisfied with my time as I broke 2:50 like I wanted to. I went 2:49.67. Scott was ahead of me on 2:49.00 but he seemed visibly annoyed with his time. I am sure he will do better the next time he races it...

My last race of the day was actually a relay race. I decided to enter originally just because I thought my teammate Joe was in it but after I realized he wasn't, then I just swam it anyway for the fun of it. I decided to do 50m butterfly for time (instead of 50m freestyle as it was a freestyle relay) and the rest of my teammates on the relay didn't seem to mind. I lead off the relay with a 34.74. I was definitely satisfied with that as well as it was faster than what I swam the last time I did it a couple of years ago and was at the end of the meet.

Overall, I was quite satisfied and I hope to keep up this momentum and swim really well at provincials.. I guess time will tell...

Backstroke feeling good

I've been feeling really good on my backstroke lately in swim practice. On Wednesday, we did a set of 6x50 and then 8x50 on 1:00 and 2:00 respectively and I was averaging around 39 or 40 for all the reps, and on the last one, I think I did a 38 or 37.
In practice last night, the end was a strong 100 and I did a 1:26 for that. I wasn't even going all out and I still managed that. I'm definitely satisfied with those efforts. I think I have a good shot at the meet of breaking 2:50 for 200 backstroke this time around. I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch so to speak, but I think I have a legitimate chance. Nothing is ever set in stone until I've absolutely done it. THat's one thing I've learned. So, I'll just have to wait and see what the result will be and hope that it will meet my expectation.

It doesn't look like I'll be going to the Victoria Meet in March due to some cash flow problems. The truth is, I lost my job not too long ago and I've been unemployed for the past couple of weeks. It's not something I like to talk about because I feel ashamed but I am looking for more work to tide me over. After June, I'll reassess my options and see what I'll do. As a result of all this, my cash flow is pretty tight as my girlfriend is the only one right now who is bringing in any money. So, I decided to cut the Victoria meet out. I could use that money to buy groceries instead I think.

Anyways, it's not all bad. At least I'll still be able to go to provincials since it's local. I will work towards that.

Swim Practice Last Night

Last night's practice was fairly uneventful actually and not too strenuous I think despite the complaints of some people.
We started off the practice with 8x100m on 2:00. The first two were swimming (choice of stroke) and the last 6 were 50 kick/50 swim. It was actually pretty challenging to make the pace time for the 50 kick/50 swim since my kicking is so poor and most of us didn't use fins.

After that, we did 3x400 on 8:00, 7:30 and 7:00 where each 400 was divided up as follows:

100 backstroke
200 IM
50 fly
50 free.


I actually did fairly well in this set as I seemed to virtually lap the other people in the lane. I'm sure everyone else was tired though but overall I didn't mind it. Even the 50 fly wasn't too terrible.

We finished off the workout with 4x50 (50 scull/50 swim) on 1:15.

In total we did about 2200m which is a fair amount I guess but it didn't seem like it for some reason. I hope I can keep up the momentum in my swimming for the swim meet coming up in a few weeks.