Anyways, this was a short course meters meet in Bethesda. I swam my normal events, the 50/100 fly and 100 IM. I got Masters personal records in all three, both in the SCM and converted SCY times! In addition, per the time conversion I used, I finally got the Nats cut in the 50 fly!
100 fly: This was my first event. It just felt off. My stroke felt slightly out of sync, my pacing felt pretty cruddy, my turns only felt so-so, and it overall was just a weird swim. My converted time (1:01.57) was still a couple tenths of a second faster than my previous best, so I'll take it.
100 IM: This was a BIG meet (240+ swimmers), so I had a bit over a three hour break between the 100 fly and the 100 IM. I read about half a book while I was waiting. Anyhoo, the swim itself felt much better than the 100 fly did. Had a great start, good fly-back turn, great underwater work, and I didn't totally die on the free like I have the last few times I swam the IM. That being said, my back-breast and breast-free turns weren't perfect--while I didn't completely misjudge my turns, I was a shade further out from the wall going in than I'd have liked, so the turns were a bit stretched out. Not enough to the point where I should have taken another stroke, but enough so that I glided a little bit on each. Sigh. My non-fly turns in general are killing me. All that said, my converted time (1:03.58) was a couple tenths of a second faster than my previous best, like in the 100 fly, so I'm happy about that.
50 fly: Hands down the best swim of the day. Fantastic start, very solid and pretty quick turn, and everything felt in sync. Up till this meet, I've been breathing twice down and twice back. This time around, I changed my breathing pattern and did three down and five back. I've been working a lot on making my breathing be more efficient in practice (that is, keeping my head inline with my body so that I don't ruin my body position when I breathe; thus allowing me to keep up the momentum whether I breathe or not), so I was able to keep my speed up and also not hit the oxygen deprivation at the end of the lap that my previous twice back breathing pattern subjected me to. It seemed to work! All total, my converted time was .53 faster than my previous best, so it was a great swim! And, for pure icing on the cake, the converted time I swam (26.76) was .02 faster than the Nats cut! To be fair, I probably could have not taken that last breath coming back and eked out a couple hundreths of a second more, but still, this was a very impressive swim for me.
Now, since I finally got a Nats cut, I can enter in 4 events at Nats, up from three. The deadline to enter is this Thursday, so I need to decide what the fourth event will be by then. I know I'm going to swim the 50/100 fly and 100 IM for sure. The events I'm considering are the 200 fly, 50/100/200 back, or the 200 IM. What do y'all think?
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