Jorge & Yolanda Caragol Masters Invitational

This entry is part 14 of 18 in the series Race Club Diaries

The best way to get your body used to swim fast is to race. For this reason, Saturday morning in Islamorada is race day. Warm-up and get ready to swim fast. Even better than race in workouts is to race in meets.

Somehow in the first part of your preparation cycle, the most important point is not always to swim your personal best but to get the effect of fast swimming. After two weeks of hard work in a camp, I was really happy to join the local Masters swimmer Tanya Hanson for the meet in Lauderhill.

We left Islamorada early on this Saturday morning to be on time for the warm-up. After a bit more than an hour and a half we arrived at the pool. The weather was not perfect on this Saturday morning with a chilly breeze. But nobody cared about it and I started to feel the meet atmosphere coming up to my body. At least for me, this is something very important. I can swim fast in workouts, but never do it the same way as in meets. Something that probably can be seen as a weakness (personally, I think it’s a point where I still can improve, but on the other hand I also think that it is one of my strengths).

I decided to rather take the effects than the results from this meet and enrolled in for four races in a row, with only little rest in between. As expected, my results have not been interesting, but on the way home I already started to feel the effects. Probably this sounds a bit strange to some of you. It did to me when one of my coaches told me so. But Mike Tyson told it in other (better) words:

“It’s not quite as important who you beat as that you end up on top.”

On the way back home we stopped to buy some food but as soon as I lay down on the coach at The Race Club house, I was already asleep.

Last but not least: I want to say congratulations to Tanya Hanson who won several events on this meet. And, by the way, she broke in almost every race her personal bests.