Call it a recency bias, but I don’t ever remember reporting this many weather-related issues in a month as we have in the last couple of weeks here at SwimSwam.
The latest to take a hit is the VISAA – Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association – who have totally redone their event schedule.
Historically, the organization has done half of their prelims Friday morning, half of their finals Friday afternoon, and then repeated for the rest of the races on Saturday.
Under the new schedule, all of the prelims will be on Friday afternoon, and all of the finals will be on Saturday afternoon, where presumably weather and travel conditions will improve as the day gets later.
This is a pretty significant change. While it shouldn’t totally overthrow anybody’s plans, under the old schedule, the day break came between the 100 fly and the 100 free. It wouldn’t be a surprise if there are several swimmers who were entered in the 100 fly and 100 free, which would be a fairly common combination if it weren’t for the typical high school event lineup.
At any rate, there was some small sigh of relief, given that when athletes woke up this morning, the whole meet was in jeopardy.
Hmm, weird to look at the results last year and see the times Francis Haas was going. Unless he wasn’t even remotely tapered for that meet, he really exploded out of nowhere. 4:37 500, and if I remember correctly he was 4:18 in December 10 months later
he went 37 when his best time was low 20’s. completely untapered
Get used to having that kind of weather more and more often in North America each winter.
While here in France we get used to having more and more floods, storms and abnormally high temperatures as it’s the case for 2 months.
Climate change.