**Results are posted here

Day 3 action

Today was the last day of the SPMA SCM Regional Championships and a pretty easy day for me, just one race – the 100m fly. As is my habit I got to the pool way too early and watched people swim the 800m free, well one guy did it butterfly (wow), and I chatted up the other early birds. It took a while for the pool deck to fill up today, I think everyone was trying to time the end of the 800m to get some extra sleeping in time after the long days that preceded this session.

I really wanted to do well in my 100m fly. I’d been doing really good with my butterfly events this weekend and wanted to get in a hot swim to cap off the year. During the SCM season I swam a couple of 1:06′s and a rogue 1:11 a couple of weeks ago while wearing a drag suit so my main goal was to break into the 1:05′s. I was feeling pretty good standing behind the blocks and when they announced my name I made sure to wave and smile like I was on NBC or something :) My plan for the race was to work the walls the best I could and swim like hell… pretty simple. I felt really good of the start, the Belmont pool is nice and deep giving me a lot of room to kick. I went out in about 30 seconds which is pretty good for me (my 50 time is 29.3) and things were looking up when I had enough air in the tank to take my kicking out pretty far on that 3rd 25. I started feeling a little rough on that last turn but my stroke rate kept up. I finished in a 1:05.78 which I am super stoked about! According to the Swimming World Time converter that puts me at a high :58 in yards. It was also good enough for 2nd in my age group!

It’s going to be a little while before the LiveSwim guys get all the video from the meet processed (when you consider how many splashes there were at the meet it’s going to be a fairly herculean task!), but in the meantime my friends Patrick and Kathleen from Rosebowl came through with some footage from the bleachers of my 100m fly! Thank you!!!

After my swim I hung out at the pool for a few hours just being social because, well, I was 4 hours from home and I’d rather have fun and hang out than drive on the 405 :) While I was there I got to see some great swims, but my favorite was watching Jeff Commings (who you might be familiar with from Swimming World) completely destroy the world record in the men’s 35-39 50m breaststroke! The old record was 28.57 and Jeff laid down a smoking fast 27.79! Not only was it a great swim, but his reaction afterwards was priceless… arms in the air, smiling draped backwards over the lane line… I can’t wait until the video of this one comes out!

As the week goes on I should have some more swim excitement from the meet. Keep an eye out for pictures and video between here and probably Wednesday.

Joel from the17thman counting in the 800m free

the view from the back deck of the pool does not suck

**Results are being posted here

warm up in the comp pool

Just finished a loooong day at the pool. I have to start by congratulating the Grunions for doing such a good job with such an unwieldy meet. There’s 604 swimmers registered for this thing! Wow! That leads to some pretty long days and they’ve really held it together well. No major delays and timers in the chairs the whole time. Thank you Grunions! Also this meet has been unreasonably fast! 43 world records and 18 American records so far!!!

I got to the pool around 7:30 this morning (and left at 6:30 tonight!) and warmed up early even though it would be hours before my first event. I’m weird like that. After getting in some swimming in the main pool I finished up in the warm up pool just to have some space to myself. Afterwards I started tracking down some of the people on my team and we set up shop up in the bleachers. I think I only sat down up there like twice all day! I was on my feet floating around talking and cheering and counting for people all day. Pretty much everybody is here! There’s swimmers from all over the country and even a Canadian contingent.

Eventually I actually swam an event! I started with the 50m fly. I’ve been kind of inconsistent in this event this season. I’ve had some ugly times and some best times scattered through the short course meets. Today turned out to be a good day. I swam a personal best time of 29.3 which is a .47 second drop from my best time! I’m excited about it. I really wanted to get down to a 28.9, but this is close enough I guess :)

After my 50m fly I went into attempting-to-find-reasons-not-to-swim-the-200-fly-mode. I’ve been having a hard time getting into the pool recently and I was pretty worried about my fly tolerance. I was seeded into heat 5 of 6 which didn’t help either, I was convinced I was going to get smoked. After hours of waiting for it, it was finally go time. A whole bunch of my friends were set up at different ends of the pool to cheer or take bets on how long it took me to gas out… I’m not sure which, I get tunnel vision when I’m racing:) I wanted to go out in like a 1:13, not to fast, not to slow. I ended up going 1:11 which was probably a little too fast. I was hurting on my 2nd 100 but I didn’t fall apart. I may have had some “extended” turns though… My stroke held together, it just got slower. I came in at 2:37.43 which is a 5 second drop from my swim at Pacific Masters SCM Champs back in October. When I got out of the pool I thought my head was going to explode, I’m not sure how much I want to keep swimming this event… it’s harder than I care to admit!

My last swim of the day was the 50m free. It wasn’t awful, but I was still feeling that 200m fly. My arms were smoked and I was breathing too much. I swam a 29.1 which is like a half second slower than my best time. Meh. 2 good swims and one bad one, I’ll take it.

I don’t have a whole lot of pictures and no video just yet. The good news is my celebrity photographer friend Mark Savage (who took the super rad pics of me at Santa Clarita) was taking shots during the 200m fly and LiveSwim.net was filming all day. I should have pictures and video for you guys as the weekend/week progresses.

I’m swimming the 100m fly tomorrow and maybe the 100m IM depending on how late it happens. If you see me at the pool say hi! Don’t forget to check out the Livestream of the meet if you can’t make it out at grunions.liveswim.net!

coach Ahelee doing some coaching… she broke a WR Friday night btw!!!

the warm up pool

The LiveSwim.net guys gave me a tour of their operation, cool stuff!

you really can’t argue with the location of this pool

this bike rack makes me happy on the inside :)