Last October, I was schedule to swim in a Masters meet, but picked up a cold during the week preceding it.  I still wasn’t totally recovered by the day of the meet, but I didn’t have a fever, and I was reluctant to miss the meet, since there aren’t all that many Masters meets in my area in any given year.

The Masters swim meet schedule is quite a bit different from a high school or college swim meet schedule.  All Masters meets are essentially invitational, you have to sign up for events in advance, and there are nearly always limits on how many events you can participate in at each meet.  Also, I am virtually always hoping to set a personal best time in each event, and there’s a practical limit on how many events I can do at one meet without jeopardizing my chances of doing that.

The combination of relatively few meets in a year, official and practical limits on how many events I can do at each meet, and a growing number of events I want to do in competition each year makes my participation in each meet important.  So I decided to go ahead with the meet and see what happened.

My first event of the day was 200 yard freestyle.  And during the first 25 yards of the heat, I became aware of a problem:  I didn’t feel like I was getting enough air!  This may have been because what was left of the cold made me need more air than usual.  Or it may have been because there was some residual congestion in my lungs that was causing me to get less air from each breath than I normally would.  Or it may have been both.

I realized that if I was feeling like I wasn’t getting enough air that early in the heat, it was likely to become a major problem by the end!  So I switched to a more complex breathing pattern.  During the early laps of a 200, I normally breathe every third stroke, though in the later laps, I’ll sometimes switch to a breathing pattern in which I breathe twice on one side, then twice on the other.  But in this heat, I switched, during the first lap, to breathing twice on my right (which is my more familiar breathing side), then once on the left, then twice on the right, and so on.

Although I am slightly more comfortable breathing on my right side than on my left, it became clear that my left side breaths were very important.  I spent many years swimming with poor technique and breathing only on my right side, so when I breathe only on my right side, those bad muscle memories reawaken.  But each time I took a breath on my left side, I could feel my swimming form snap back into place.

On the final lap, I was starting to feel winded, so I switched to breathing only on my right side.  And while I was getting more air that way, I could also feel that my swimming technique was not as good as usual.  My time for the event confirmed that feeling:  I was more than 8 seconds slower than my personal best time.

My next event was 50 yard freestyle, and even on that event I was forced to breathe more frequently than every three strokes (though I can usually make it the entire way breathing every third stroke).  My time for the event was more than 1.5 seconds slower than I had done six months earlier.

My final event of the day was 50 yard backstroke.  At that point in the year, I had already set personal best times in 100 yard and 200 yard backstroke, so I had really been hoping to set a personal best in 50 yard backstroke, so that I’d have set personal bests in all three backstroke events in 2009.

My backstroke heat went a lot better than the others, and I’m pretty sure that this was because my breathing difficulties weren’t as much of a problem in that stroke.  In the end, though, I missed setting a personal best time by 0.16 seconds!

That turned out to be an important experience, though.  I’ve spent a lot of time since that meet thinking about how short an interval of time a sixth of a second actually is.  And I think about it now every time I’m finishing a heat.  I can never know exactly how well I’m doing in a heat until I touch the wall at the end and look up at the scoreboard.  So I always imagine now that I’m a sixth of a second off a personal best time, and I swim as though that were true.

And that has already paid off!  In December, I was in another meet and swam 50 meter backstroke.  And this time, I did set a personal best time, knocking more than half a second off my previous personal best time in that event!

In summary: 

1) Don’t always swim an event the same way every time you do it in practice.  Experiment with varying things like your breathing frequency, so that you are prepared to be a little flexible during your race.

2) If you’re not at top of form on a race day, be sensitive to ways it may be affecting your swimming, and deal with them before they become serious problems.

3) Don’t be discouraged if you don’t perform as well as you normally do.  Just think of it as seeing how well you can do under adverse conditions.  Remember that the real test of champions often isn’t how well they can do on a good day, but how well they can do on a bad day.