22.80 in the 50 Free against Cullen Jones, and I'm proud of that!

Shortly after my 100 Back I was warming down thinking... I really have no interest in swimming a 50 Freestyle. The pool was very hard to see in due to all the bubbles that are created by moving through the water normally. It was then that it struck me, I should dive in and turn over during my 50 Free! I've ALWAYS wanted to try it. I've seen plenty of guys do butterfly in a 50 free but NEVER backstroke. I've been dying to know what an actual "dive" is worth versus a backstroke start. In college, each race was too important to ever try anything silly like this and I've just never had the interest since then. But I figured with two 50 Backstroke races in the bag this weekend, one at 23.48 and the other 23.62 I had a good baseline to compare to. I wanted to see how fast I would go with an equal amount of effort.

After warming up, I looked at the heat sheet and realized I was going head to head with 2008 Olympian Cullen Jones and 50 Free SCM American Record holder Nicholas Brunelli. Now, I had two options here:

1. Swim freestyle and at best, go a 20 point high still getting annihilated by two of the fastest men on the planet so bad that it looked like I was an age group girl swimming against them.

2. Realize that NOBODY would be looking at me anyway and just have some fun with it and swim backstroke in perhaps the biggest race of the entire meet.

I chose option 2

What's kinda sad is that most people just saw my time of 22.80 and thought... wow, Kevin really dropped the ball on that one, that's pathetic for him. They think this because on paper that's exactly how it looks. Yet the video shows something very different. It's me, sort of holding with the pack of freestylers! It was actually a really cool experience to look over and see those two guys in my heat. I dove in, flipped and did a few backstroke dolphin kicks and surfaced swimming backstroke. I had a good turn and brought it home with everything I had!

I can assure you that everybody with a pulse in that Natatorium was watching Cullen and Nick (and for good reason). After my race I walked by Mark Gill, the (Fantastic) announcer for the meet. He sarcastically asked me if I won my heat. I laughed and said no, I was up against the Olympian. He replied "I know, just joking". I said, you didn't see me swim backstroke did you? He laughed and with a big smile replied "NO!". I smiled and said, I know, not a single person in here even cared, which was the whole point. I could have dove in without a suit on in the lane next to Cullen and I'm pretty sure nobody would have said anything. Mark and I laughed and he immediately directed me to the film crew in the corner to get my story as he was laughing. When I got over there they said they had just put the gear away but it was a great story!

Anyway, I'll just tell this story in the future that Cullen and I had an unspoken agreement to dive in and turn over to swim backstroke and he backed out on the deal. That version makes me seem fairly awesome.

In the end I swam a 22.80 to FINALLY answer my long standing question, "How much is a dive worth". And in my case, it's worth about 0.70 seconds! SOLVED!