Flashes of Panic

• 400m free. I’ve only done this once, last year, and I used that as my seed time. The nice thing about a 400m is that it’s long enough that you actually get to spend some time in the pool, but not so long that things have time to get really ugly. In my current condition (I have no speed) I could pretty much sprint the whole thing, and I nearly did. That is, I got in, settled into a brisk pace pretty quickly, hit halfway before I thought I had gone very far at all, then managed to hammer the second half. Once again, I don’t remember noticing the pool being any longer than usual; last year, the difference between 25m and 25y was painfully obvious with every lap. At some point I remember thinking that nearly 1,000y of warmup hadn’t done my shoulders any favors as far as fatigue, but by the last 100m I’d forgotten about that. I still haven’t managed to find where the results are posted online so I can check my splits, but I finished in 5:45, ten seconds under last year’s time (and again, on less training.) I suppose not having to stop and re-seal my goggles probably made a difference.

• The same team that set the 100-120 age group club record for the 400m free relay yesterday lined up for the 200m free relay. Again, a vacant record; this time all four of us had just done the 400m open. My brother led off; Zach, with his broken ankle, was second. I watched Zach kneel on the blocks with his good foot forward, then as my brother was coming back, Zach pushed up on his good foot so his broken ankle was extended behind him, and used this three-point block start to get in. I made a fair exchange afterward, thrashed down and back as quickly as I could, then hauled out to watch Son wrap us up with a 2:00:3x, which won our (slow) heat and again will be the new club record for relays with combined age between 100-120, or so I’m told. I could see my leg looking at the splits: 28, 29.2, 33, 29.5.

• Apparently in our heat, someone forgot they only did one lap for the relay, and turned at the start end and headed out again. This was a problem because their teammate was already in the lane ahead of them, having started over them as they turned; there was a collision at the far end when two people, each believing themselves the only one in the lane, tried to turn at the wall. One of the participants was easily recognizable on deck with his long white beard; Zach, telling Son about it as the next heat started, said, “Someone took out Santa!”

• I returned after an hour or so of rest for the 200m free. Earlier, some of the veterans in the bleachers had been complaining about how hard it was to pace a 200. I explained that for me it was easy; I’m so slow, I can pretty much sprint the whole thing. This isn’t quite true, as it turns out; the problem with my current lack of condition is that even though I can swim a 10-second PR, I can’t then come back a few hours later and hammer again. I had a small leak in my goggles from the start (just a tiny one—but I saw someone else’s goggles at the bottom of my lane, so evidently someone was frustrated enough that they just took them off.) I tried to focus on hitting the turns, which I didn’t do very well, and I was having a hard time pacing. I thought I’d gone out easy, but by the third lap my shoulders were burning. I wound up with a 2:43.9x, which was almost two seconds slower than my seed time (converted from last spring at Exeter.)

• My shower was delayed while someone lined up a College group photo. We had me, a classmate of mine who had actually been on the team, the coach from our era (down from Middlebury,) who was actually one of my track coaches for two seasons, two grads from 1980 or thereabouts, and a parent of a current swimmer. I heard a new story about my first year roommate which I hadn’t heard before.

Now Playing: Once in a Lifetime from Remain in Light by Talking Heads