Over the weekend of 28th – 30th October, Clevedon doubled their previous representation at the ASA Masters National Shortcourse Championships, once again at Ponds Forge, Sheffield. David Stewart and Neil Carpenter made the journey north to compete with other swimmers from around the country in their respective age groups, David in the 25-29 years and Neil making his Masters debut in the 19-24 years age group.

With at least one major traffic jam on each of the three motorways they were to use, the journey took nearly six hours resulting in David missing his 100m Backstroke swim on the Friday evening, but at least they were nice and early for their swims on Saturday.

Both swimmers began with the 50m Breaststroke on Saturday morning with mixed results. David set a new pb of 33.96, knocking 8 hundredths of his previous time set at the same event a year ago. Neil did not appear to have quite woken up and was disappointed with his swim of 38.45. The 100m freestyle, which followed in the afternoon, was more pleasing for both swimmers. Neil returning to sub 60 second swims with 59.48 and David recording his fastest time for 18 months with 1:00.05.

Both swimmers had entered the 400m freestyle, illness in the build-up to the event showed a reduction in fitness in their races, with Neil Posting 5:03.68 and David with 4:51.69. However, Neil still had reserves for his 50m Freestyle race later on Saturday, setting a new pb to dip under 27 seconds with 26.98.

That was their race programme complete, leaving them to sit back and watch Sunday’s racing, including several British and European records being broken. Notably, on a local front, Eric Henderson of Soundwell set a new European record in the 55-59 years age group with 1:04.37 for the 100m Butterfly. Over the weekend, more than 1000 swimmers aged from 19 to 86 Swam in the 10 lane 50m pool divided into two halves allowing upto 20 swimmers to compete at any one time!

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