So last week was the culmination of the varsity swimming
season at the Ontario Championships (OUAs) held in Ottawa this year (apart from
those who qualified for the Canadian Championships). I had been looking forward
to this for a while as I feel that my swimming has really improved over the
last few months and was ready to set some great PBs. Unfortunately it didn’t
quite pan out as I had hoped.
In an honest assessment of when things took a down turn I
think it is traced back to December, when I went a little gung-ho on the
training. Exam time for most people might be time to relax, perhaps even study,
but I have always seen it as an excellent opportunity to get in more training,
so did exactly that. At the time it seemed like a fantastic idea, and in
principle it was, but I went a little overboard and did more than I was ready
to handle, leaving me quite fatigued towards the middle/end of December. I took
a few days easier, but not easy enough, and then went to swim training camp, where
I thought that keeping up the cycling, adding in some running, along with the
extra swimming would be a great idea.
Although I was able to handle it, (ie. i'm still alive) I was definitely very fatigued by the start of
January and as a result my immune system was not functioning as well as it
should. Add in thousands of other students on campus who were sick with
something or other and I also fell victim to the colds going around. A week of
clogged sinuses was followed by a week and a half of non-stop coughing up
phlegm and general tiredness. A week out from OUAs I started to get better, but
even by the time we were leaving for the meet I was still not feeling great and
was extremely tired. I told myself that I would be okay as adrenaline would
kick in at the meet and I would be fine, but I think I was just too tired for
it to really make a difference in the end.
I started off the meet spectacularly by being the first
person to be DQ’d, right at the beginning of warm up. I was nervous and did what
seemed to be a perfectly normal thing and dove into the water, anxious to get
swimming and calm the nerves. What did not occur to me at the time was the fact
that diving in during warm-up is technically against the rules, although a rule
that is rarely enforced. However, the officials at the meet were enforcing all the
rules and I was called out of my lane after 50m of warm-up. A few choice words were muttered and I gave a
short rant to the official (something about swimming 16 hours a week, no-one
was near me in the lane, no signs were up saying no diving [which is also one of their rules, but one they chose not to follow], etc) but he had absolutely zero
sympathy and gleefully took my name down telling me I was now disqualified from
my first event (400 free).
My coach did
his best to get this reversed, but to no avail. Fortunately there was a time
trial at the end of the morning session for anyone who wanted to swim an event
(basically a few heats with everyone doing something different within the
heat), so I was slotted in to that so that I could still do the race. Getting
calmed down and then amped up again 2.5hours later is a challenge, but I did my
best and tied my PB (4:53) with no one to race against. I’m not going to
complain about the situation (I did break the rules after all), although I do
believe that I am capable of swimming at least six seconds faster than that.
The bright side of things is that taking 4 days off biking and 5 days off running seemed to do the trick and I am back to my usual self- a very good thing since I am down in Arizona for reading week to train outside in the glorious sunshine (details to be in a later blog post)
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