Too tired to talk

I developed a whole new level of respect for people, all sorts of people, at the weekend. Saturday night I was too tired to talk and had somehow managed to drive back from Glasgow without causing a major motorway incident. However I did have a little bundle of metalwork to clutch in my hand to cheer me along the route home. Competitive? Me? Well, what do you think?

The eight of us representing the East Lothian Masters who went to Tollcross to compete in the Scottish Masters on Friday and Saturday would like to think that we've arrived on the scene in style. The two younger ones have been competing at club level quite recently but for the rest of it was a whole new and humbling experience! Having raced (sorry, taken part) in triathlon over the last few years, I could not have believed how hard it would be to do a series of swimming races over a day and a half - after all, on a triathlon, it's non stop for (in my case) more than an hour and a half, and what can be so hard about swimming a few lengths of the pool with big long rests between races?

I suspect my cause wasn't helped by the virus I was incubating; my considered advice to the kids would have been that they shouldn't be racing. But hey, whoever listens to that sort of
advice? By length 5 of the 200m freestyle I was hanging on to the toes of the lady in the next lane but thinking I might die. By length 7 I could barely breathe, knew I was going to die and the toes in the other lane were going in the opposite direction. Strangely, I still seem to be alive. I found that the 200m, a distance I have never raced before, was by the far the hardest event as it is on the cusp between endurance and sprint. In contrast my first race was the 800m, very definitely endurance. I felt very calm before I hit the water but, halfway down the first length, the realization of what I was doing suddenly hit and my pulse rate rocketed. It took a few lengths to get things back under control and so my pacing and overall time weren’t great. I then lost count about halfway through but eventually could hear the ringing of distant bells. No, I wasn’t hallucinating; they were ringing for the final 50m – unfortunately mostly for other people. Mine seemed to be a long time coming. I’ll try harder next time!

By the time I got to the 50m freestyle at the end of Day 2, I felt like I really had very little left; a bit like the walk back up the road to the car after a long day in the hills. And when I say I have never raced the 200m before, what I really mean is that I have done no racing of this sort for over 30 years and even then not over the distances I was doing this weekend. Meanwhile, there were 80 and 85 year olds approaching the blocks with walking sticks, leaping into the water and setting new Scottish Records with abandon. If I'm still alive at 80 I'll be happy, let alone swimming butterfly. And so many people seemed to be racing all the strokes at all sorts of distances.

Well, how did we all do? Fiona won gold in the 200m breaststroke and bronze in the 100m. Brad won bronze in the 50m and 100m fly and was very cross that he was beaten in the 50m by only 2/100ths of a second. Sharon, in a very competitive age group, was 8th in the 50m fly. Martin, a cyclist turned triathlete turned swimmer, found the competition hard and pace judgement difficult and came 4th in the 400m free and 100m back and 9th in the 200m free. I took silver in the 800m free, bronze in the 400m & 200m free and came 4th in the 50m fly and 5th in the 50m free; my times weren't good but it was certainly a whole new experience. We also swam several relays with David and Susan coming over on Saturday just for those and our esteemed coach Jason making up the numbers and injecting some youthful pace! There was confusion (read "argument") about the eligibility of our relay teams as, in most of the races, we had one swimmer in the 18 - 25yr old category and it turned out that the whole team should be either under 25 or over 25 but not mixed. Oh well, we were only racing for the joy of it! By some fluke, however, we did collect gold in the womens' medley, despite my appalling efforts at 50m backstroke.

So we’ve won some medals, posted some times and shown the swimming world that there are swimmers east of Edinburgh. Let's hope everyone enjoyed it enough to enter some more meets and that next time we'll all have the confidence to enter more individual events. Thanks to Jason and John for organizing us all. And never mind t-shirts in team colours – what we need are team coloured sharkskin body suits. Then we can really strike fear into the opposition.