Masters Worlds Recap

Hi all,
 
I'm 'back' in the Netherlands for a week after my Italy experience. Didn't have access to this e-mail account so here is a short summary of my experience.
 
We arrived in Italy on Saturday late afternoon. Sunday we went to the pool where they were working on the 800m. The pool facilities looked great but actually weren't that great. There was an indoor 50 meter pool with a warm-up pool of 25 meters and ONLY 4 lanes. (Note, there were a bit over 9500 competitive swimmers in total.) The outdoor pool was also 50 meters and there was an outdoor warm-up pool of 25 meters and probably 6 lanes. There were more lanes but some were reserved for synchronised swimmers. Men were indoor door competing when women were outside and vice versa.
While they were doing the 800 meters, things were fairly relaxed. Here is how it worked. One heat in the water. One heat standing behind the blocks to go (they used fly-over starts) and one heat sitting behind that on deck. THen, they had a 'call room'. In the call room, four heats were sitting ready on designated seats (with lane number). And a computer screen in the call room had another three heats on it who needed to stand-bye outside of the call room for being called. In other words, while one heat is swimming, another 6 are sitting ready in a specific area and another three had to be close by. Forget about doing a few short sprints just before your race!
 
Monday were my first two races. I got up around 6am because warm-ups started at 6:30am. The meet started at 7:30am. (The hotel was biking distance to the pool). The warm-up was okay until they closed the 50m pool and we had to go to the 25meter (indoor) which there was not enough room for all of us. My first race was the 100m freestyle. My seedtime was just about the qualifying time and I signed up to reduce the emphasis on the breaststroke. My goal for the two freestyle events was to get a qualifying time. I think I swam around 11am or something like that and swam a 1:09.91. This was a PR and within the qualifying time. I was ecstatic! Ranked 235 out of 323 people that swam the event (up from being seeded 311 out of 360).
Went back to the hotel for lunch etc. and to get ready for my 'main' event, the 100 breast. I was expecting to swim around 6pm. I eventually swam it around 8:30pm. It was a long wait! (the last swimmers for the 100 breast ended up swimming just after 10:30pm! This, where it was scheduled to finish at 8pm) I swam a 1:24.13 which was VERY DISAPPOINTING. At the Tri-Cities meet, without giving my body rest, I swam a 1:22 so I figured with rest I should have been much faster. I ended up being 72nd out of 178 swimmers (initially ranked 78th out of 206, the difference between 178 and 206 is basically no-shows).
 
Tuesday was a day of rest for me and we watched some of the Dutch swimmers we/I know. Wednesday, was a repeat from Monday except there were the 50s. So, getting up early again (actually, this was not hard, I had hardly been sleeping anyway, the jetlag causing a lot of problems). First race, the 50 freestyle. I swam a 31.78. Another bad race. The qualifying time was 31.68 so I missed it by 0.1 seconds :-(  Officially I have no result. Officially only 299 people qualified. Unofficially, I ranked 302 out of 395 swimmers (initially seeded 432 out of 441). What this shows/illustrates is also that many people did not meet the qualifying time. In fact, I ended 3rd in my heat so all the others didn't qualify either. In fact, while I was swimming, I was ahead of the two heats next to me and during the swim I was thinking that I was going to have a PR. Unfortunately, these other lanes didn't even get close to qualifying.
Then the same story from Monday repeated itself. I was expecting to swim around dinner time but ended up swimming the 50 breast at 9:30pm (the last swimmers were after 11pm). Needless to say, warm-ups were pretty much impossible or at least not relaxed and the whole 'call room' thing was chaotic because with the 50s there was barely enough time to call 10 names in the 45 seconds or so for a heat. Anyway, I swam a 38.05. Another major disappointment. Again, at Tri-cities I swam faster without rest :-(  My final result was a 96th place out of 214 (originally placed 88th out of 262). Well, maybe I should be happy about being in the top 50%.
 
Thursday another day of rest. We went to San Marino, a small country that is entirely surrounded by Italy. It has about 30,000 inhabitants. Pretty interesting and we (my family) enjoyed it a lot.
 
Friday the last day/race for me, the 200 breast. I have limited experience swimming it but have been making progress on it. By now, I figured it didn't matter anymore what I would do on it since the overall meet was disappointing already. My warm-up was okay/relaxed. I did some breaststroke drills. My race was at 10:30am and the one thing I had in mind was to relax the first 100. Nothing else really. I was in lane 9 (so seeded among the slowest in the heat) and right from the start lane 8 and 10 were ahead of me. By the turn I was quite a bit behind those two lanes (in fact, I was about last at that point although I didn't know it) but I was concentrating on my own race and to not let myself get carried away by what others were doing. At the 100 mark, I was before the flags when those two lanes already turned. Then, according to plan, I sped up. At the 150 mark, I was close to lane 10. In fact I turned a second or two after him but after my pull-down, I caught him. I finished third in my heat. Swam a 3:01.39 which was again disappointing (swam a 3:00 in Tri-cities) but I think it is an Inland Northwest record (established in 1982 so it has been standing for 30 years) so that made me feel good. Overall ranking 41 out of 102 (originally seeded 59 out of 129). My splits show that I have work to do: 42.67, 45.92, 45.82 and 46.98 but the positive thing is that based on this I know I can go much faster. Next time, I need a coach to stand there and yell/coach me, that would have helped.
 
So, overall, I feel a bit disappointed in the fact that I did not have peak performance. On the other hand, hey, I have three breaststroke events where I ranked in the top 50% and one where I finished 41st in the world. Furthermore, I did swim a qualifying time on the 100 free. Lessons learned include that having peak performance at this type of event is difficult considering the venue (limited warm-up space and chaotic experience) and the travel (jet-lag, exhaustion from taking 37 hours to get to the destination). Also,  I learned that typically about 10% of swimmers do not show-up (actually, I learned that in some instances swimmers forego a late night race so that they can perform better the next morning on a 'more important' swim) and typically 15% of swimmers are not able to swim a qualifying time. So roughly speaking you lose about 25% of the competition right there.
 
In 2014 the world championships will be held in Montreal, Canada and I hope that other SWAT swimmers will join me there!
 
I've seen the Summer Plunge results. Did you all have a good meet? How was the timing? How did people feel about it? Should we organize it again next year?
 
Harm-Jan