So this weekend I decided to enter a swim meet to see what times I was doing. The meet was being held in Santa Cruz, a seaside town west of me (I visited Santa Cruz already, so look in my archives for more about it), in an outdoor 50m pool at the University there, which sits atop a hill. This would have been all good and well had it been a warm sunny weekend, but this really wasn't the case. It was overcast, breezy and about 13-17 C with passing moments of sun making it warmer, with some added rain on the Sunday.
The meet itself was nothing like the ones in New Zealand. First off I got told off for jumping into the pool during warm-up (in NZ you can't dive, but you can jump), as you have to do a
'three point entry', i.e. sit on your ass and slide in.. Then they have no marshalling area, you have to go see a board which posts your lane and heat number and then turn up for it yourself. The whole time that swimming was taking place, they had a warm-up/down lane going. Most of the swimmers would do a couple minutes of warm-up before their race there and only jump out about ten seconds before they were called to the blocks and hence do a
'wet start'. As this was my first such meet, I decided to go with my NZ method of
'dry starts', which meant that I probably wasn't able to loosen up before a race as I would usually like to, as the outside temperature wasn't that warm...
My results were very,
very average, about the same as when I swum at Wellington Champs back in January
:( The meet itself was like an everyone meet, so starting at 9am it didn't finish till about 4-5pm. This was with starting races from each end! Let me explain, they started odd and even heats from opposite ends, so when the heat currently swimming was on it's last lap, they would start the next heat. I don't think anybody ever caught the previous heat up, but it certainly was an interesting way of cutting about thirty seconds off waiting for each race..
So this weekend I decided to enter a swim meet to see what times I was doing. The meet was being held in Santa Cruz, a seaside town west of me (I visited Santa Cruz already, so look in my archives for more about it), in an outdoor 50m pool at the University there, which sits atop a hill. This would have been all good and well had it been a warm sunny weekend, but this really wasn't the case. It was overcast, breezy and about 13-17 C with passing moments of sun making it warmer, with some added rain on the Sunday. 
The meet itself was nothing like the ones in New Zealand. First off I got told off for jumping into the pool during warm-up (in NZ you can't dive, but you can jump), as you have to do a 'three point entry', i.e. sit on your ass and slide in.. Then they have no marshalling area, you have to go see a board which posts your lane and heat number and then turn up for it yourself. The whole time that swimming was taking place, they had a warm-up/down lane going. Most of the swimmers would do a couple minutes of warm-up before their race there and only jump out about ten seconds before they were called to the blocks and hence do a 'wet start'. As this was my first such meet, I decided to go with my NZ method of 'dry starts', which meant that I probably wasn't able to loosen up before a race as I would usually like to, as the outside temperature wasn't that warm...
My results were very, very average, about the same as when I swum at Wellington Champs back in January :( The meet itself was like an everyone meet, so starting at 9am it didn't finish till about 4-5pm. This was with starting races from each end! Let me explain, they started odd and even heats from opposite ends, so when the heat currently swimming was on it's last lap, they would start the next heat. I don't think anybody ever caught the previous heat up, but it certainly was an interesting way of cutting about thirty seconds off waiting for each race..
1 comment:
OoOoOoooo you are steaming up the pool. very nice.
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