I am still to go to my first meet, so I was very curious about one thing: how do swimmers(pretty much everything except freestyle) watch their competitors in other lanes, especially when moving your head can do some time damage when it really matters in very tight and important competitions.Do swimmers actually sometimes not see what is going on next to them and just try to swim their best?I was watching the 200m. breaststroke final from Athens and if you pay attention to the last meters of the race it looks like Brendan Hansen was not aware of the hungarian kid(Daniel Gyurta)coming right behind him to steal his silver which he did in a very amazing waY.Hansen could have taken two short explosive strokes at the very end instead of gliding slowly with one long stroke to finish the race where he lost to the hungarian by .08 sec.
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Former Member
I too have yet to go to my first meet, but when I swim I like to practice watching my "competitors" in the lane next to me. If there is people swimming next to me, then I find out different ways to watch them without messing up my stroke. I figure this way, I can use it in a race, and since it's only practice it doesn't matter if I find one that slows me down. My favorite one so far is to scan the "horizon" when my head is underwater for breaststroke. I use my glide to scan my eyes without moving my head. For butterfly, I'm usually to focused on messing up my stroke to worry about anything else, so just do what works for you; and on backstroke, I just try to look out of the corner of my eyes. That's just what I do. Have fun at your first meet! and GOOD LUCK!!!
~Kyra
I too have yet to go to my first meet, but when I swim I like to practice watching my "competitors" in the lane next to me. If there is people swimming next to me, then I find out different ways to watch them without messing up my stroke. I figure this way, I can use it in a race, and since it's only practice it doesn't matter if I find one that slows me down. My favorite one so far is to scan the "horizon" when my head is underwater for breaststroke. I use my glide to scan my eyes without moving my head. For butterfly, I'm usually to focused on messing up my stroke to worry about anything else, so just do what works for you; and on backstroke, I just try to look out of the corner of my eyes. That's just what I do. Have fun at your first meet! and GOOD LUCK!!!
~Kyra
