I just got back from California where I swam in the SPMA Zone meet at Mission Viejo over the weekend. I met both Mel Dyck and Kevin Joyce. Nice to meet you both!
I suppose I can gloat about my victory over Kevin in the 100 free. We were right next to each other, in lanes 4 and 5. Kevin had me at the 50 (28.24 to 29.15), but I was able to pull away on the second 50 and won 58.65 to 1:00.09. I'm happy with that time, but really I should have been out faster.
My other big adventure was having to swim the 400 free twice! When I touched the wall I looked up and saw a 4:23 on the scoreboard and I knew that was wrong. Turns out the manual timer just wrote down what the board said (yeah, not real useful) so they had no "real" time to use. The end result was I had to swim again if I wanted a legal time, and I did. I was a couple seconds slower than what I presume my time was the first time around based on the splits, but I'm pretty happy considering it was my fourth race of a looong day!
Anyway, saw some great swims and met a few new folks. Congrats to those who competed and good luck to those going to Nationals this weekend.
Thanks, Jeff.
Yes, the timers did have stopwatches. I can only guess the person timing in my lane either didn't start their watch or just didn't know any better than to write down what the readout board said. They did have the "pickle" buttons, too, but I asked and they said there was no button time either. It's definitely something that shouldn't happen when you have primary, secondary and tertiary timing systems in use, but obviously can if the person responsible for the last two of those doesn't really understand what they're supposed to be doing.
Thanks, Jeff.
Yes, the timers did have stopwatches. I can only guess the person timing in my lane either didn't start their watch or just didn't know any better than to write down what the readout board said. They did have the "pickle" buttons, too, but I asked and they said there was no button time either. It's definitely something that shouldn't happen when you have primary, secondary and tertiary timing systems in use, but obviously can if the person responsible for the last two of those doesn't really understand what they're supposed to be doing.
