The meet has been going amazing. It seems that every time an American gets in the water, a world record is set. As for me, I have been very pleased with my swimming. The first night I swam the 400 free. It was my first time swimming the event at worlds. I swam my best prelim swim ever in the morning, leaving me very confident for finals. However, I was disappointed in my swim at night.

I put a lot a pressure on myself and was very nervous before the race. When I do that, I tend to end up disappointed. Before my races I normally tell myself to just have fun and to do my best. However, this race I was more concerned about everyone else than myself. I still swam well. I finished sixth and went my second-best time ever. While I was upset that I didn’t get a best time, I now look at this swim as a learning experience. I figure that a poor swim is only bad if you don’t learn from it. I have now raced the best in the world and see how I measure up. There are lots of things I can improve, which actually makes me feel great. I know that I will continue to drop time because I have lots of places to improve.

I also swam the 1,500 free. On Monday, the prelims were swam. I went a 16:07, a very good prelims swim. I just wanted to make it into finals. The 1,500 is actually a hard event to swim in prelims because it is impossible to know what you are going. Sometimes the race will feel easy but the time will be slow and sometimes it feels awful and ends up being a great time. In prelims, I felt strong but not easy and I was surprised to see such a fast morning swim. This made me feel great for finals. I was third going into finals.

On Tuesday night, the finals of the 1,500 were held. I felt great going into it. Unlike the 400, I was totally calm and confident going into the race. I decided to just have fun, if you can do that while swimming the 1500. The race got off to a smooth start. It was so easy. For the first half, I felt like I could keep going forever. Around the 1,000 mark, my body started hurting though. Flavia Rigamonte, the girl swimming in lane 1, began to make a move. She was rapidly catching me. However, I was not going to give up the lead I had worked so hard to gain. I fought back with everything I had, reminding myself of the grueling practices I had done to get to this point.

At the end I touched the wall in 15:53.05 — a best time by 2 seconds and 0.95 off the world record. I was so excited with the race. Sure, I would have loved to break the world record and I have many times thought if only I kicked a little harder or streamlined a little tighter than maybe I would have broken it. But I have places to improve on and hopefully I will continue to drop time. Now I am looking forward to swimming the 800. Prelims start tomorrow, followed by finals on Saturday night.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under kateziegler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.