Your First Swim Meet

This time last year, you wouldn’t have called yourself a swimmer.

Look at you now.

You’ve picked up the lane etiquette. You’ve expanded your repertoire of stroke drills. You’ve nailed all the turns and you streamline off every wall. You learned how to swim butterfly, and Coach says you’re a natural. 

You joined a workout group, and now you’re training three days a week. You grasp workout sets at a glance and you read the pace clock reliably. Sometimes you even lead the lane. 

You’re ready for the next challenge. Your first swim meet. 

Here’s what to expect.

Swim meet warm up

When you attend workouts, you swim sets on pace times with 5 or 6 other swimmers at more or less the same speed. At swim meets, none of that applies. First of all, be prepared: the pool is going to be crowded. For most one-day masters swim meets, registration caps at 150 swimmers. In an 8-lane pool, that’s about 18 swimmers per lane, all of them variously swimming, drilling, kicking, pulling, pacing, and sprinting different strokes at different speeds.

The chaos of swim meet warm up can be intimidating, but if you familiarize yourself with a few written and unwritten rules, you’ll get over your fear. You’ll find a summary of Swim Canada’s official warm up safety procedures in your meet package, and you can go over them a few days beforehand. When you get to the meet, you’ll notice that the fastest swimmers tend to warm up in the middle lanes (4 and 5), and the slowest swimmers in the outside lanes (1 and 8), with everyone else somewhere in between. It’s up to you to self-assess, but if you choose to warm up in one of the outside lanes, be aware that they’ll be cleared 15 minutes prior to the conclusion of the warm up period to make way for one-way diving off the blocks or backstroke starts only.  

The purpose of your swim meet warm up is to get your body ready to swim your program. At workouts, the warm up is designed to prepare your body to execute the main set. For example, if the main set involves race pace 50s, the warm up might  include a short kick set to get your legs going and a pre-set of breakouts + 2-3 strokes at speed. You are not going to be doing endless long effort 400s in preparation for a fast 50 freestyle. 

When you are planning your swim meet warm up, think about the events you will be swimming. Are you mostly sprinting? Do you have a distance event? What strokes? Some swimmers have a go-to meet warm up that they do almost superstitiously, but it’s helpful to make adjustments based on your program for the day.

Here are some suggestions:

• Do some easy, continuous swimming. Try to relax.
• Swim the strokes that you will be racing that day.
• Pay attention to how you feel in the water. If your sequencing feels off, do some stroke drills. If you’re not holding water the way you like, do some sculling. 
• Do enough kicking to get your legs warmed up, but not so much that you’re going to start the day with a bunch of lactate in your system. 
• If you have a longer race on your program, you might want to forgo the diving lane and take advantage of the emptier middle lanes to do some 50s of pace work. 

The Swim Meet

At the end of the warm up period, the meet manager will clear the pool and run a few tests of the timing system. You’ll probably hear the starting signal go off more than once, but don’t worry, you haven’t missed anything. It takes about 15 minutes for all the officials and timers to set themselves up. 

How do you know when it’s your turn to race?

When you registered for the meet, you chose some events. Each event is numbered, so look for your event numbers on the meet schedule and follow along. You also submitted an entry time for each event. The meet manager uses the entry times to sort swimmers into groups of 8. Each group of 8 is called a heat, and every swimmer in the heat is assigned a lane. 

Heat sheets are always emailed to competitors a day or two before the meet. You’ll be able to read through the heat sheets and figure out when and where you are swimming. If you’re worried you’ll forget, you can print off the heat sheets and highlight your races. Some swimmers write their program on a forearm for easy reference! You can also verify heat and lane assignments on meet mobile, an app equally handy for tracking individual and team scores, viewing race results, and analysing splits. 

Race Protocol

Try to get behind your lane a couple of heats ahead of time with your cap and goggles ready to go, especially for a sprint event. Suppose you are in heat 3 of a 50 freestyle event. When heat 2 is finished swimming, you will hear a few short whistle blasts. This is a signal for heat 2 to clear the pool and for heat 3 to be at the ready. Sometimes the starter will say “clear the pool” to get everybody moving. After this, you will hear a long, sustained whistle blast, and this is the signal for heat 3 to climb up on the blocks or jump in the water (backstroke start). 

When you’re up on the blocks or in the water, get yourself into your starting position. Swimming is not like track. The starter does not say “On your marks,” pausing to allow the athletes to take their positions, and then “set,” before finally firing the gun to start the race. In swimming, the starter simply says “take your marks.” An electronic beep signals the start of the race.

Good Sportsmanship

After the race, stay in the water until everyone in your heat is finished swimming.  Climbing out of the pool while your competitors are still racing is considered poor sportsmanship, so don’t do it! Remember, we race to bring out the best in one another. High-five your competitors and invite them to share your win: your first swim meet!