What can I say… this meet had such a great vibe! It was so fun and positive and FAST! I’m really glad I got to spend the weekend down there and so many people from my team were there to swim with me. I think
Conejo Simi Masters was something like 50 people deep, maybe a little more with relay swimmers, and everyone did great. We had a few people like me that swim meets all the time, but a lot of them were swimming their first masters meets and loving it. You could see so much progression in some people across the 3 days of racing. I hope a lot of them get the bug and start coming to more meets.
As far as my races, they all went pretty well. I dropped .2 tenths of a second on my 50 free which puts me at a 29.28… borderline statistically irrelevant in my age group, but still a strong time for me.
My main event of the day was the 100 fly. (I have some video of the race courtesy of Julie, but I’m having some video publishing issues so that might hit the blog a little later. In the meantime I grabbed a few screen caps of the race.) I think I had a really good start and breakout but my energy level wasn’t 100%. I went out a little slow for me (33ish or so I’m told), but I finished better than usual. I touched at 1:09.33 which is about a .4 second drop. I’m happy to have a new best time, but I wish I would have been able to crack into the 1:08′s. I swam a 1:09 something everytime I swam the 100 fly this season.
My last individual event was the 200 free. This has never been a good event for me, but it fit my schedule so I decided to go for it. I’m not impressed with my time, but it did score points for the team. I swam a 2:33.23 which is 6 seconds faster than I did it in the relay the day before, but it’s still not great.
The end of the meet finished with RELAY PANDEMONIUM!!! 4 relay events all on top of each other in rapid succession with 50 people being shuffled from event to event. It was totally nuts but it worked out. A lot of heats had 3 to 4 CSAM teams in them, I commend Coach Nancy on her strategic relay building prowess! I swam the breaststroke leg on the men’s 200m medley relay, led off the men’s 200m free relay, swam Fly on the mixed 200m medley relay, and then lead off the mixed 200m freestyle relay. I’ve never swam like this before… race to one end of the pool, get out, walk back to the blocks to figure out which relay you’re on next, repeat. I have no idea what kind of times I swam, I have a feeling some of them were questionable… but it was a good time.
When all the dust settled the team rankings came out: 1. SCAQ, 2. Ojai 3. Conejo Simi. It was nice to see SCAQ bring out so many swimmers. They’re such a big club but a lot of the local meets only bring out 5-15 of their swimmers, this weekend they were out in full force. Congrats guys! Ojai also brought tons of swimmers and did a great job in the pool. I’m pretty happy with our 3rd place and I hope next year we can all duke it out again but with even more swimmers!
If you’re looking for results you can get them here.
If you’re looking for all the Zone meet coverage on this site go here.
