Meet report by Caroline Makin
Caroline Makin travelled to the Central Coast, NSW to compete at Toronto on Lake Macquarie on Saturday,14 July 2012 in the NIB Hunter Festival of Sport. Her main focus for making this long trip was to take the 15-year long standing 40-44 year age group club record for the SC 800m Backstroke! She also decided to have a go at two sprint events whilst she was there.
Caroline’s second reason for heading to this beautiful area of NSW was to go wine tasting in the Hunter Valley with her hubby Scott!
Heading to the pool an hour before warm up, Caroline attended the Masters Swimming timekeeper’s course to allow her to get her timekeeping official qualification.
After a brief warm up in a pool with the smallest starting block she’d ever seen, Caroline came out of the pool thinking that the water felt a bit on the warm side and her mouth felt a bit dry. After a big drink to quench her thirst, she took her turn to doing some timekeeping for the 400m events.
Caroline’s first swim of the day was her target event – the 800m Backstroke. The first 200-300m felt OK, but then she started to get a really sore throat, her mouth started to get really dry, and she could feel herself getting really hot. From that point on, the sore throat, dry/numb mouth just got worse and worse, and by the time she got to the 500-600m mark, her face felt like it was burning up. She struggled through what was a pretty unpleasant experience, but still managed to come home in time just over her endurance PB of 13:35, smashing the club record by near to three minutes!
All the swimmers at the event agreed the pool was too hot and everyone was complaining about the affect of the water and the horrible mouth dryness/numbness. The consensus of opinion was that was too much chlorine in the pool and Caroline’s throat was still sore the next day!
Caroline also swam a solid 100m Backstroke and a great personal performance in the 50m Butterfly, knocking 0.8s off her previous PB.
30 points and 1st place in her age group, Caroline went on to truly celebrate at the wineries at the Hunter Valley the next day!
Full results are available.
