British Masters Nationals Day 1

13 June 2025

Friday the 13th might not generally be thought of as an auspicious day, but it was a beautiful day, inside and outside the London Aquatics Centre, for racing. Contrary to my typical approach of packing too many events into a single day, I've gone with a minimalist approach here...

• Friday, 400 IM

• Saturday, 400 free

• Sunday, 800 free

... and then added the 50 back leadoff on our 240+ mixed medley at the end of the second session today, and will start off Saturday morning with a 50 free as the second swimmer on our Barnet Copthall team's 240 mixed free relay.

As I've mentioned in other posts, my training since racing in Canada at the end of April in the month of May was haphazard - mostly easy swimming, not a lot of training volume or intensity. The only thing that's kept me in shape is that I did race a fair amount in May -

• May 10th - Reading

• May 17th - London Regionals

• May 18th - Middlesex Champs (which I didn't blog about)

But, since coming home from Malawi & Nairobi at the end of May, I did manage to put together a decent string of harder workouts for a week between May 30th & June 7th, so I decided to "taper" this week, slap on a new TYR tech suit (which was on a 50% off sale) and see what I could do.

400 IM

• Masters Best – 4:58.10 (2012, age 45)

• 50+ Best – 5:20.58 (2025, from the London Regional meet on May 17th)

• Result – 5:17.77

• Reaction

  • Well, this hurt ... and it didn't actually feel fast, but that's a lesson I learn time and time again: how you feel doesn't always correlate with your result.

  • I was in lane 4 of the second to last heat, with a young guy (30-34 age group) on my left (lane 5) and a guy in my age group on my right ... well, that's the way it was, but I forgot the arrangement during the fly and freaked the **** out when the guy in Lane 5 went out like a bat out of hell on the fly (1:04.70). I felt positively pedestrian at 1:09.73 (which was 2.7 seconds faster than I had gone out back in May).

  • I admit I let that guy get into my head a bit because I thought it was the guy in my age group, It took me until about the 175 meter mark to recall the heat sheet and to realize that it was the young guy.

  • I continued my "try to negative split" each 100 and, looking at the splits later, see that I executed that well on the backstroke (40.7-39.7) and freestyle (36.62 - 35.96), but was a little off on the breaststroke (47.08 - 47.96).

  • Interestingly, I was out much faster than ~4 weeks ago by the 200, almost 4.5 seconds faster, but then split slower on the second half of the race.

  • Still, it was yet another "Age 50+ Best and a great way to start the meet.

  • My friend and teammate Cate videod this from the 50 onwards. You can't see the young guy much, but I had a nice "back & forth" race with the guy in my age group.

As I finished up the race, the announcer shared that I had broken the British National Record (which is 5:18.99) ... but then had to retract that when a teammate of mine informed her that I was not a British citizen.

"Well, maybe he has broken the Canadian record," the announcer said, "But I don't have access to those."

Alas! I need to drop another 5 seconds to get that ... next year ;)