Race Result

Racer:	Steve Smith
Race:	Terrapin 1000/1650
Date:	Sunday, December 8, 2002
Location:	College Park, MD
Race Type:	Swim - Swim Meet
Age Group:	Male 30 - 34
Time:	0:20:17
Comment:	Not what I expected, but an improvement

Race Report:

I swam this event in 1997, several months after I started training for tris (Jun 97) and just before I took a 3-year hiatus (Feb 98 - Jan 01) finishing in roughly 24:30. Since then I've done two other meets. I seem to remember a 1:08 100 free in 1997 (SCY) and a 6:05 500 free (SCY) last February.

I swam a 20:17, which I was pretty happy with, even though the target was sub-20. What made the swim satisfying is that I swam VERY consistent splits before negative splitting the end. After a fast start (oops, adrenaline) for the 150 (1:43), I settled into a 37.5 pace. I'm fairly certain any variation was related to turns. My following 500s went like this: 6:14 6:13 6:05. This surprised me somewhat 'cause toward the end I felt like I was falling apart and slowing down. Apparently, I was getting stressed, but not falling apart. When I swam the 500 last year, I bounced all over the place, sometimes varying as much as 2 seconds between 50s.

I swam the meet with Steve Giorgis, my partner in crime for the early morning swim sessions with the Curl-Burke kids. Steve beat me out of the water by a little more than a minute at the Reston Triathlon this year; yesterday he beat me my 14 seconds with a 20:03. I'm hoping that he's gotten stronger in the water since Reston as well. I know I have. I did a fairly heavy day on Saturday, the day before the meet, swimming 3000m, running a mostly easy (except for snowy sections) 7 miles, and spinning an easy-moderate 2.5 hours on the rollers. Giorgis spent the day fighting a cold.

The University of Maryland pool is huge and quite nice. I ran into Bob Williams at the meet (of course). Why he looks tan in December is beyond me. Oh yeah, I guess that's one of the advantages of racing Hawaii.

Well, that's the new baseline. Hopefully next April I'll see some improvement when I go in for the next big swim test. My goal is to break 19 minutes at some point. Whether I can do this by next October (1 year after kicking up the swim volume) remains to be seen. I'm also looking forward to some other swim meets and events, maybe including some fly events, just because the stroke is so fun.

An interesting point: I'm capable of covering 25 yards in 12 strokes if I really concentrate on stroke length. Mid way thru the swim I counted 17 strokes per lap for 3 straight laps.

Splits:

31.9 34.9 36.9
(01:43)

37.4 37.0 37.3 37.6 37.6 37.3 37.8 38.0 37.4 37.3 (06:14)

37.2 37.4 37.4 37.7 37.7 37.5 37.8 37.1 36.9 36.7 (06:13)

37.3 36.7 36.7 36.7 36.7 36.6 36.7 36.7 36.4 34.9
(06:05)

Not quite sure why the splits added up to 20:15 ... maybe rounding, or maybe I missed something in using Excel to add up seconds and display in minutes.