Tonight was a very good night for me at he All-American Long Course Championships here in Austin, Texas. I wasn’t expecting too much because I have been training pretty hard and I’ve been kind of tired. I had a decent 400 free yesterday but nothing to write home about. So when I went a best un-rested time by 2 seconds in the 400 IM I was pretty excited.

Two years ago I went to Rome for a meet and went a 4:19 un-rested in the 400 IM. I remember being happy to have broken the 4:20 barrier without rest. Then I went on to go a best time later that summer of 4:12. Tonight I had a great race with Eric Shanteau and just barely came out ahead of him. I definitely could not have gone that fast without the kind of close race we had. I was out a little faster at the 200 and he caught up in the breast. The race then boiled down to the free and I beat him by about a tenth of a second. I would have been happy with a 4:17 whether I won or not but it made it all that much better to just out touch Eric. Lately we have had some really good races. At winter nationals he barely beat me, then a few weeks later it went down to the wire with me coming out on top, now down to the wire a third time with me winning again. It seems that lately racing Eric has brought out the best in my 400 IM. There is one day left in the meet and I am going to do the 200 breast in prelims and the 1500 in finals. My free hasn’t had as much speed as I would like, but it has felt really good technically lately. Also my breast was very strong in my IM tonight. So hopefully tomorrow will bring as much success as today did.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 8:10 am and is filed under robertmargalis. 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.