The pool was fairly busy but I reckon that by tomorrow the place will be really packed out. It's all about trying to stick to your own race plan, despite the noise and bustle and unpredictable time table.
An early decision to have lunch on arrival at the pool, turned out to be a sensible one as I wolfed down an extremely healthy (!) sausage sandwich, (carefully considered and selected for its nutritious value! Yeah right it just smelt great!)
They adopted a really interesting marshalling system, firstly and thankfully you marshalled outside the pool, away from those horrible cramped and claustrophobic call rooms they used in 2004, you turned up about three heats before you thought you were going to swim and they simply called you out in your competitor numbers until they had a full heat. Very efficient and quite simple but I wondered what happened when they arrived at the penultimate heat and found they only had 11 swimmers would the fastest swimmer (theoretically anyway) have the chance to swim in splendid isolation as Billy no mates?
Fortunately I didn't have to worry about that problem being ranked at 374. Eventually, my number was up and I was called out to find that I was assigned the lane of death again. Lane 1. Aargh what a horrible swim, I'd felt pretty good in the warm up but I hit the water and it was like swimming through treacle. I have to confess by about 150 I was seriously considering stoping and by 400 I figured I should just treat this as a warm up. I was spectacularly last in my heat and so far behind the rest that the scoreboard had been switched off by the time I finished.
Warm up
600 metres steady
2 x 50's 25 hard 25 easy
800 race....bleargh 12:12.21
300 swim down
1800m
No comments:
Post a Comment