by Dave Scott
The Spring Ahead meet is a two-day SCM 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).
For the 2024 meet, 108 swimmers registered for Spring Ahead. A change that was made this year was that the meet was held very early in the morning, as opposed to prior years where the meet commenced in the afternoon.
Three athletes from Team Walker International Masters made the journey south to Oregon: Barnes, Lickwala, and Scott. Two other Puget Sound Masters swimmers were present at the meet, a father-daughter combination (Adrian and Caley Haydu) who were able to swim side-by-side in many of the events. I took a video of the 100 Backstroke event using Adrian’s phone, which turned out to be a very exciting race wherein his daughter managed to sneak past him on the final approach to the wall, finishing a fraction of a second ahead of Dad. In speaking with them after the race, they were both really stoked about racing and were having a great time at the meet.
It was a good meet for Brent and Holly as they racked up some personal bests, with Holly besting her 200 Free PB by over 2 seconds. Brent exceeded his PB by over a second faster in the 100 Free.
I only attended the first day of the meet and then drove up to Anacortes, WA for the Sunday meet that was held at the Fidalgo facility. Brent informed me that on the second day of the Spring Ahead meet, I missed a couple interesting developments. The first was that Holly had a very fast and exciting 100 IM race wherein she out-touched a competitor by 2-one-hundredths of a second.
The second development was that there were two Elvis impersonators present amongst the crowd. Apparently the King likes watching pool races. Speaking of Elvis, “Cryin’ all the time” is good caption material for race photos of the 200 Breaststroke. I always wear mirrored goggles for the 200 Breaststroke – to hide the tears.
I stuck around Saturday to swim the 200 Breaststroke, but sadly Elvis was not there to cheer me on. I had a fun race and it was my first time trying out a “technical suit.” I wrestled with the brand-new tech suit just prior the 200 Breaststroke, eventually winning the suit-wrangling contest, and only half-jokingly wondered if I’d tired myself out before the race even started. The swim went well given my limitations, and I steered clear of making any major errors. Sometimes swimming a 200 without an “oops” is a victory in itself.
