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...