Brit Nats Day 2: Tenths Matter

14 June 2025

Back at the wonderful London Aquatics Centre this morning for two events - a mixed 200 free relay and the 400 freestyle individually.

The relay was the very first event, so I did a quick & dirty sprint-oriented 600 meter warmup in the diving tank, starting about 25 minutes before the race so I could be warm and ready to go. I went second and felt exceptionally strong and controlled. While I generally prefer racing almost all events in short course versus long course meters, not having to faff around with the turn on the 50 made it quite fun just to blast straight down the pool. While I know there's an advantage with a relay start, my 27.07 split is very fast for me. The fastest flat start 50 I've ever gone as a Masters swimmer was a 27.17 a dozen of years ago. Our team came in second ... but behind an impressive Sheffield team that broke the British and European record!

400 Free

• Masters Best – 4:27.99 (2012, age 45)

• 50+ Best – 4:42.30 (2025, from the London Regional meet on May 17th)

• Result – 4:41.60

• Reaction -

• I set a goal at the start of this season to get under 4:40. While I still think I can do that (and will try again in early August in Manchester), it didn't materialize today.

• In contrast to the 400 IM (which didn't feel fast), today felt so much better than my swim a month ago, but I only ended up a bit more than a handful of tenths faster. But, at least it was enough tenths faster to notch up my second win:

• My splits compared to my swim in May showed that the difference was in the middle 200.

  • May 17th - 1:07.7, 1:11.5, 1:11.8, 1:11.3

  • June 14th - 1:07.7 - 1:11.1 - 1:11.4 - 1:11.3

• Time aside, what I was happy with is that I made some progress towards my goal of swimming this breathing every two strokes. As I've noted before, I grew up as a bilateral breather, breathing every three strokes. But, virtually no elite freestylers swim like that anymore - they all breathe every two, with maybe the occasional three (or the approach that Daniel Wiffen uses which I described here).

• As I still feel unbalanced breathing only to one side, I used a descending pattern where, on the first length, I breathed seven times to my right before a quick switch to breathe to me left the remainder of the length. Then on the second length, I started with 6 breaths to the right, etc. So, that, on the last length, I breathed only to my left.

Here's the video, with props to Cate Jackson for taking it: