Studying the Psych Sheet

I went through the psych sheet today to determine when the swimmers in my event swam the times they listed. The point of this research was to determine if I was swimming against people that swam their best in 2008. If they swam well recently they're capable of swimming even better next week. The flip side being, perhaps they swam their best time in 2005 and they might be a little rusty by now. I determined that about 80% of the swimmers swam the seed times in 2007, only a few swam them in 2006 and a handful of guys swam them in 2008. What does this prove? Not a whole lot, but I like being familiar with my competition. I would say that everybody ranked higher than me is capable of swimming as fast or faster than they've been before. The fact that most of them haven't swam faster in 6+ months is inconclusive because they've probably been training hard since they made their cut just like me.

I had a great practice today. I used today as my last hard practice as well as a test run for some race pace swimming. I'm feeling very good in the water. Everything feels as it should at this point in my training. I did some 100's today, a set recommended to me by my former coach Sean Hickman. I swam 45 meters slow then 55 meters all out. This gives me a good method of working on my speed off the wall because I am swimming fast through the turn. The fact that I was finishing on the 1:10 on every single one tells me that 2nd 50 was well below 30 seconds, right where I should be. I'll use the rest of the week to taper down from the 4,000 meters I did today.

I went to the grocery store and bought a gross amount of food I fully intend on declaring war on this week. The feeding has already begun.

I fly out Friday for Omaha!