First Time Racing at London Aquatics Centre

17 May 2025

For all the times I have gone to swim at the London Aquatics Centre. I have never done two things there.  

• I’ve never raced in a competition.

• The diving wall has never been open for swimming.

At Saturday’s London Regional Championships, I ticked both of those off my aquatic bucket list.  

I got to race the two greatest events on the swimming program - the 400 IM and the 400 free - and notched up best times in both over the last decade.  Here's how they went:

400 IM

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

• 50+ Best – 5:21.00 (2020, age 52)

• Result – 5:20.58

• Reaction

  • Since my taper & shave meet in Toronto three weeks ago, I have basically been traveling extensively, swimming relatively little (averaging less than 10,000 meters per week), and most of that being easy, stretch-out swimming.

  • I'm not the kind of guy who can do what amounts to a four-week taper, so I just tried to swim this as conservatively as possible, aiming to "sleep" through the fly and then negative split each 100. This strategy worked out well:

    • Fly - 1:12.44 (34.66 - 37.78)

    • Back - 1:22.07 (41.92 - 40.15)

    • Breast - 1:34.75 (47.35 - 47.40)

    • Free - 1:11.32 (36.62 - 34.70)

  • While I was happy with the time, and I will swim this again at the British Masters Nationals on Friday, June 13th, my training opportunities will continue to be sporadic through the end of May, so I'm not sure I'll be appreciably faster by then.

  • I still believe that, with some focused training, I could take this under 5:10, to be more consistent with my SCM time.

400 free

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

• 50+ Best – 4:44.44 (2022, age 55)

• Result – 4:42.30

• Reaction

  • I was very happy with this result, as I was 4:49.28 in January of this year at Crawley, and this bested a "tapered & shaved" time from 2022.

  • My splitting was solid - 1:07.7, 1:11.5, 1:11.8, 1:11.3 - if lacking a bit of closing speed, and I felt like I executed my race strategy well, conserved my energy, but still finished exhausted.

  • This is one event where I might get another shot after Nationals to race again this summer, as I'm toying with using an August 9th one day meet in Manchester as an opportunity to train hard for ~6 weeks post-Nationals and then a taper to race both the 400 & 200 free.

  
  

Now aside from racing, because they were using the diving well as the continuous warm-up and cool down pool, I swam enough meters there to add it as pool #738 to my #1001pools list!