by Dave Scott
The Spring Ahead meet is a two-day event hosted annually by the Oregon City Tankers at the Oregon City Municipal Swimming Pool. The team name “Tankers” has a bit of interesting Oregon City history to it and dates back to the 1960s. Tankers coach Tim Waud is the Chair for the Oregon Local Masters Swimming Committee (LMSC).
This year 102 swimmers registered for the Spring Ahead competition.
A noteworthy race was the 240-279 Women’s 400 Medley Relay. Four exceptional swimmers showed up with the intention of breaking the FINA world record, and set the record with a time of 5:32.28. Congratulations!
Three athletes from Team Walker International Masters made the journey south to Oregon: Barnes, Lickwala, and Scott. No other Puget Sound Masters swimmers were present at the meet. The TWIM swimmers collectively chalked up 8 personal best swims, with Brent Barnes reaching a personal goal of going under 40 seconds in the 50 meter breaststroke. In the image below you can see Brent getting some good distance off a breaststroke turn.
Holly had some good swims including two personal bests. I watched her 200 IM along with the regulars from her personal cheer squad. Although the swim was not a personal best, it looked very fast to my eyes. I actually thought it was going to be a PB since it was such a solid swim.
Your author arrived at the meet not expecting to break any world records and in fact did not break records of any kind, by a wide margin. The records just rested on their laurels, pointing in my direction and laughing. Despite not being within a light-year of any records, my 400 Freestyle, which prior to the race I audaciously compared to crossing the English Channel, was 5 seconds faster than my previous “crossing the Channel” attempt at this same meet last year.
Without the standard-bearer present at the meet (looking at you Dan) there was no TWIM banner present. However, TWIM accoutrements were spotted in the wild, bearing the TWIM logo.
This meet had several things in common with the previous meet that I attended (Hood River last November):
- Brent, Holly, and myself were all present
- The format was Short Course Meters
- The meet was in Oregon
- I forgot belongings that were recovered by Brent and Holly
That’s the sound-bite for Spring Ahead. We’ll see everyone at the upcoming Champs meet in Federal Way.
