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Race Report: All-Out Swim

While I can almost always wish I had swum faster, I had a pretty perfect day at the Downtown Swim Club's All-Out Swim meet, hosted long course at the Varsity Pool at the University of Toronto:

  • I got to swim two of my favorite events - the 200 fly and 400 IM - and managed not to die on either of them,

  • The schedule worked out perfectly to pop out for a lovely lunch with my second daughter, Monica, who happened to be up from Hamilton for the weekend,

  • I left motivated to continue my progress towards my end of the season (May) goals at the Canadian Masters Nationals

  • And even more excited to see how I'll do on those events in Short Course Metres in a couple of weeks at the Steven Forsey Invitational

200 fly - I was damn scared to attempt this in long course and my fears were warranted. If anything taught me that I need to work further on my conditioning, it was this. My time wasn't horrible at 2:34.71, about a second slower than the last time I swam it ... back in 2016 ... but I was impersonating a T-rex by the end ...

400 IM - The two+ hour break allowed me to power up like a millenial with Avocado Toast at Flock's Harbord location, and get energized by Monica's enthusiasm. I was more ambitious taking out the fly than I probably should have been ... because I pretty much gasped for air throughout the backstroke, and was still so out of breath that I couldn't do an underwater pullout to start the breaststroke. I think I had finally calmed my heart down at about the 275 mark, and turned in a respectable enough 5:21.00. Like a lot of my racing during this "comeback" of sorts, this was the slowest time I've ever done in Masters ... but it was "less slow" than I expected, so I'll take that as a win.

50 free - Because you need a lark of a race every so often, I entered this. Contrary to all sprinting advice, I breathed practically every stroke, but my 28.65 was only 1.5 seconds off the best I have ever swum (all the way back in 2013).

100 fly - While I should have been super-tired by this point, my endurance held up and I swam a 1:07.82 on this, which was much better than expectations and converts to a faster SCM time than I did in November.

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