Racing Ugly, But Happy (#746 & #747)

9 August 2025

After I finished my first 400 LCM free of 2025, back at the K2 Crawley meet in mid-January, I wrote ...

I still think I can get back under 4:40 this year with more focused long course training and then a true taper meet!

While I cannot say that my training has been as consistent, nor as focused as I probably needed it to be, I made three subsequent attempts ...

• In May at the London Aquatics Centre (LAC) when I went 4:42.30,

• In June at the British Masters Nationals (also at LAC) when I dropped a smidge to 4:41.60

.... and then yesterday at the Manchester Wave Masters' brilliant one day meet at the stunning Manchester Aquatics Centre (now pool #746), which was built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games:

Manchester Aquatics Centre competition pool

... where I finally got under my goal for the year, recording a 4:39.55, my best swim over the last decade ...

400 LCM Free Results since 2015

.... but I doubt I have swum a more painful or "split-aesthetically-ugly" race in my life.

For the last couple of years, I have taken to a distance race strategy where I try to use an increasing stroke rate (and resulting increasing stroke count) as a way to control my races, starting slower and stretched out, often to negative split them. While this has produced some great swims for me (notably my SCM racing in Toronto), after seeing some videos of me swimming and then watching the much higher stroke rates of the elite swimmers at the recent World Championships, I decided I was going to try to take this race out with a higher stroke rate and see if I could hang on.

Faster I was - flipping at 1:04.7 at the 100, which was 3 seconds ahead of my split at Nationals - and then hitting the 200 at 2:13.7. At that point, I could have been onto an absolutely brilliant swim. My second 100 of 1:09.0 was precisely what I wanted to hold for the rest of the swim. I was not too far behind the leader, and hanging with the guy in my age group who is the current British National record holder in the 800 and 1500 (and who went onto break both the British and European records in this swim with his 4:31.21 final time).

I felt strong ... but maybe a little out of control.

By the 250 mark, though, I knew something was up. I didn't technically know that my 50 splits were on a steady upward trend (31.2, 33.5, 34.0, 35.0, 35.7) but, ohhhhhhh, I could feel it. I tried as best as I could to find another gear ... and I guess I did ... except it was yet another slower gear as I battled to stay afloat the last 150, splitting those 50s as 36.5, 37.0, 36.5.

It was a very ugly, and a very painful way to do this ... but I'm still quite happy with the result.

As I warmed down in the diving well (now pool #747 thanks to swimming 2,250 meters in this over the course of the meet) ...

Manchester Aquatics Centre Warmup/Diving Pool (#747)

.... I was a little less happy that I had signed myself up for an ambitious and packed schedule: the 200 freestyle coming up in less than an hour, and then both the 200 IM and 100 fly in the second session.

Somehow, even though I was still feeling quite toasty when I got on the blocks for the 200 free, I managed to swim a solid race, notching up a well-split (30.9, 33.4, 34.2, 34.2) 2:12.66, which was 1.5 seconds faster than the last time I swam this race (in 2015).

The second session proved to be too much as my 200 IM (2:33.37) was only notable in that it was better than in January, but an unremarkable time in the annals of my Masters swimming history. The 100 fly (1:10.12) was slower than January (1:09.67) and slower than my split from my 400 IM at Nationals (1:09.73). My toasty body was now burnt.

What made the meet and the day really worth it, though, was spending it with my teammate Cate Jackson. She made a late decision to enter the meet, aligned her train journey with mine, and we had a great time talking swimming, life, raising children and many other topics.

We entered smiling and left smiling: