21 December 2024
These days, I like to enter some sort of competition at least once a month. Imagine my delight and surprise when, having not been able to attend any of the earlier competitions in early December, the Basingstoke Bluefins announced a "Last Chance" meet on the winter solstice!
Imagine my further delight when I realized that the train from Waterloo would deposit me at the entrance to the Festival Mall, which contained inside it, the Basingstoke Sports Centre ...
(Pool #711 - Basingstoke Sports Centre)
... which is not where the competition was being held, but which is where I did my "first warmup" of 1,750 meters, making that pool #711 on my #1001Pools list.
Maybe I just got very lucky with everyone else mad-dashing around the malls in their last minute flurry of Christmas shopping and maybe this pool is normally as nutso-packed as most English 25-meter community pools are during general lane swimming hours. But, between about 11:15am and noon on this fine Saturday morning, I had a lane to myself, as did everyone else ... with still a lane empty! It was glorious. This pool is three levels below ground, but brightly lit, super-clean and well setup with pace clocks at both ends of the pool. I felt good (enough) on my various sets and then decamped to the mall for some pasta, as the competition wasn't scheduled to start until 3:10pm.
The Basingstoke Aquadrome features a huge indoor waterpark, a 20 meter leisure pool and then a 6-lane, 25-meter, 1.8M uniform depth main pool. I was quite happy with the racing course and we had just enough people entered to fill, but not overfill the deck-seating capacity. It created an energetic environment for racing.
Pool #712 - Basingstoke Aquadrome
I knew the racing was going to turn into a lactate-inducing slugfest because they had no cool-down facility for recovery between races (the 20 meter pool being reserved for the community), I couldn't resist doing both the 400 free and the 400 IM, and I found great symmetry in structuring 3 events each each session:
Session 1 - 400 free, 100 free, 50 back
Session 2 - 400 IM, 100 back, 50 free
My main goal was to see how close I could get to my season's best in the 400 free (4:32.12 from March) and then just hang on for the ride. Interestingly, I had some genuinely good swims mixed in throughout the ~3 hours of elapsed time. Here's how it went down:
400 free - I had a complex strategy planned which I executed perfectly ...
Stroke Count - 14 strokes per length (SPL) for the first 100, 15 SPL for the next 150 and then 16-17 SPL for the last 150
Kick count - two beat until the even lengths of the last 150 where I amped those lengths to 6-beat
Breathing pattern - for the first 250, I breathed every two strokes, breathing to my left on odd lengths and right on even lengths, then I just let it rip on the last 150
... and the result was a solid 4:33.34 (faster than the 4:35+s I had swum in April and November) with splitting decent enough at 1:05.74, 1:08.74, 1:09.79, 1:09.07. It hurt like hell, but I was pleased enough with it. I haven't been able to both train consistently and taper for this event since moving to England, but am hoping to make that happen in 2025.
100 free - My only goal was to get this under the 59.98 I had done in Guernsey back in April, so my 59.89 met that goal, making this a season best. I swam it like a true distance swimmer, though, splitting 29.53 / 30.36.
50 back - My backstroke has been feeling strong lately, so I was thinking I could get another season's best which I did, hitting a 32.02 versus the 32.50 I had gone back in March. Like always, my start sucked. (Maybe I should actually practice them sometime?!?).
400 IM - As the first session started about 15 minutes behind the original timeline, there wasn't much of a break between sessions. Love this event as I do, I am just not doing enough focused training for it so it hurt even more than it usually does. I don't feel like I executed any portion of the race wrong, but I'm just not in good enough shape to really race this. The time was my slowest of the year at 5:1404, well off the 5:06.48 from July** and a tad slower than the 5:13.64 I went at the end of September. We'll call it a good training swim.
100 back - This actually felt better than the time showed - 1:09.40 versus the 1:08.68 I had gone in early September - but I think I was still not recovered from the IM.
50 free - This ended up being my best race of the night, both in terms of execution and the result. My 27.36 time approached my "Age 50"" best time of 26.94 from a taper & shave meet in December 2021 held at the super-fast Toronto Pan Am Aquatic Center. What I felt was best was executing perfectly race strategy I had worked on during this Wednesday evening's 5 x 50 on 5-6 minutes from the blocks with Coach Adam.
All in all, about as perfect a Saturday of swimming as a racing pool tourist could ask for.
** Where I broke the exisiting British Masters National Record for 55-59 age group (5:07.81), but I can't hold it since I'm not a citizen :(
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