East Region Open Water Championships 2024
This year is my third year in competitive swimming, and I am still seeking improvement. However, I spent half of my last winter training in short distance stuff (ice swimming), and after returning from my holiday, I found out that I lost a lot of speed, and it was too tiring to go to the pool after my full-time work, so I nearly stopped swimming until Parliament Hill Lido returned to the summer timetable with evening sessions.
My result last year in London was 91 minutes, down from 116 minutes in my first championships. However, during training, I could never swim as fast as last year, in particular I could only last for 600 m now if I set my Tempo Training pace to the speed I held last year for 5 km in the pool. Therefore I didn’t have a high expectation this year.
The entry process
Last year, there was only one entry portal for all swimmers for the London Region Open Water Championships, with the 19+ National Qualifier age group subdivided into 19-29, 30-39, 40-49, and every 10 years afterwards for prize purposes. I got a medal as a result despite that my result was the 8th / 8 in the 19+ National Qualifier, hence I didn’t get a place in the nationals. This year, there were two entry links, one for Age Group swimmers with a 19+ age group for club entry only, and one for Masters swimmers with the usual Masters age groups with individual entry, but also a 18-24 age group as well, which clearly overlapped with the 19+ age group in the other entry link. After a few emails with the region, the conclusion was that I needed to register using the Age Group link as an individual to participate in the National Qualifier.
I sincerely hope that the regions could return to the previous way of registration, where the Masters Age Groups (i.e. 25-29, 30-34, etc.) are the subdivision of the 19+ National Qualifier for the 5 km event.
Race cancellation
In the last week of June, I was notified by the London Region that the Regional Championships, originally scheduled to be held on 7 July in Merchant Taylors’ School, was cancelled because of water quality issues, and National Qualifier swimmers would be accommodated in the East Region Championships in Whitlingham Adventure on 14 July instead. That’s a huge problem for me, as I was on a holiday in Edinburgh for the WOC Tour between 11 July and 16 July. The revised race day was on the same day when the sprint relay race of the World Orienteering Championships took place. If I were in the Hong Kong Team I would then have to sacrifice my swimming as a World Championship is much more important than anything else, but my sprint orienteering is not good enough to get a place in the team, so the above was just a hypothetical situation.
As I was not doing the actual World Championships, but just the public races instead, I decided to skip one day of the WOC Tour (which was a middle campus urban race). I checked train times between Edinburgh and Norwich and it would be impossible to get to Norwich on Sunday in time for the swimming race travelling on the same day, with the registraton between 13:00 and 13:30, and impossible to get back to Edinburgh in the same evening after completing the race at 17:50. This showed how useless Sunday train services are in Great Britain, despite that a direct high-speed train just takes 4 hours and 20 minutes between Edinburgh and London, where I would change at Peterborough for Norwich. The journey would be possible, although a bit tight, by flying between Edinburgh and Stansted, but Norwich is still two hours away by train from Stansted.
However, I don’t really want to fly domestically when there is a viable alternative, and it would be a shame for me if I ended up flying between Edinburgh and Stansted, which is a flight route that I consider useless, because as long as the railway network is working, I can travel by train via Peterborough to make the journey.
I checked the WOC timetable thoroughly and found out that I could actually return home Saturday evening, go to Norwich to race on Sunday and back home, and back to Edinburgh on the first train on Monday to continue the tour, without affecting my Saturday and Monday races. Fortunately my hostel reservation in Edinburgh could be cancelled, so I booked a pair of train tickets between Edinburgh and London departing Saturday and returning Monday, cancelled my original hostel reservation, and made two new reservations for 2 nights and 1 night respectively before and after my round-trip from Edinburgh to London. The total cost incurred was the following, plus the loss of one WOC Tour race:
Item | Cost |
New hostel reservation (11 July – 13 July) | £68 |
New hostel reservation (15 July – 16 July) | £23 |
minus: Original hostel reservation (11 July – 16 July) | £-199 |
Edinburgh – London round-trip train ticket | £70 |
Stratford – Norwich round-trip train ticket | £21 |
minus: expected travel cost for the London Region event in Moor Park | £-3 |
Total | £-20 |
Preparation
I registered for the Brighton Swim Challenge 5 km event, which was due to held on the original race day of London Region, 7 July. I hoped to get a feel of the distance and manage expectation before the regionals. However, the race was postponed to 14 September due to high winds.
I also did a club race in my swim club, a mile in a ultra-long-course-yards pool. It took me 28 minutes and 55 seconds, which was about one and a half minutes slower than my pool speed last year.
About a week before the race, I checked the weather forecast. Unfortunately it didn’t feel like summer at all this year, with the forecast of the whole week remained well below 18°C, which suggested that a wetsuit race was a real possibility. World Aquatics regulations require the use of a wetsuit if the water temperature is between 16.0°C and 17.9°C, which Swim England follows. I ordered a race-legal wetsuit online one week before the race with next-day delivery, such that I still had a chance to practice in it once in the pool before I head off for my holiday in Edinburgh. My speed in a wetsuit was about 5 seconds faster per 100 m compared to normal.
The race
The race was held in the same venue as in the past, Whitlingham Adventure, which is just across River Yare from Norwich but requires a long detour to cross the river. Unlike two years ago, I only did the 5 km race this year which was held in the afternoon, therefore I travelled there same day and back from my home, by cycling to Brondesbury and taking the bike onto the train, changing at Stratford to Norwich.
The race registration was between 13:00 and 13:30. I booked the train which was scheduled to depart Stratford at 10:37 and arrive Norwich at 12:18. I saw that there was a buffet with unlimited pizza and pasta at Pizza Hut so I had a buffet lunch there.
There were 4 qualifying places for London Region this year for each age group in each of the open and female categories. There were 2 competitors in my age group (19+ open) in London Region this year, which meant that there was no competitor pressure for me, I just needed to race for my own time. However, all the London Region competitors were in the last starting wave, which meant I wouldn’t have anyone starting behind me to draft off if I couldn’t follow my pack, which included some of the top swimmers in the country, and a 3-loop course meant that I was less likely to get lapped by the previous waves as well.
My main concern remained with the water temperature, if the race would end up being a wetsuit race or not. Unfortunately the final reading before my race was 17.7°C, which meant that everyone had to use a wetsuit (and it would mean that the race time would be meaningless for training purposes).
The course was a rectangular loop course. The 1 km, 2 km and 3 km races used the small loop, turning at a pair of green buoys, and the 5 km race used the large loop, swimming past the green buoys and turning at the furthest pair of yellow buoys. The organiser told us that a large loop was 1.66 km, and the race was 3 large loops. Therefore the distance between the green and the yellow turning buoys should be 333 m, which I expected about 6 minutes to turn after passing the green buoy. However, I felt that the green buoy and the yellow buoy wasn’t that far away. As expected, I didn’t have anyone to draft during the whole race, until I saw the first wave (10 minutes ahead of us) entering the finish as I completed my second lap.
My expection was 1:20 to 1:30 when the race was declared to be a wetsuit race, however, my final result was 1:17:44. The winning time for the 5 km race was 0:51:39 and the winning time for the 0:40:49, suggesting that the course distances were off. My ranking was 2nd / 2 in my National Qualifier age group, but for prize purposes I got a 1st in the 30-34 age group.
Conclusion
Anyway, I have got the job done. The next swimming race for me would be the nationals on 27 July in Rother Valley Country Park. I will have to complete within an hour after the first finisher to be within the cut off. The race will have a very strong field including elite-level GB triathletes, and swimmers who are preparing for international success. Although I won’t reach the top of the field, I hope that my result won’t be too bad.