Curl-Burke's Leslie Swinley won the 1500-meter freestyle, the opening event of the PVS Senior LC Championships. (Ishita Singh, The Washington Post)
One of the biggest and most competitive meets of the summer for Washington area swimmers kicked off Thursday afternoon with a pair of events not in the Olympics and finalists tackling them for vastly different reasons.
The result? Two gripping races and some interesting reflections after the girls 1,500-meter freestyle and the boys 800 free at the Potomac Valley Senior Long-Course Championships at the University of Maryland, a meet open to athletes of any age who meet the qualifying times.
In her last competition before returning to Charlottesville in the fall, Virginia swimmer Leslie Swinley, 21, geared her training toward the meet’s opening race, the girls 1,500. Her preparation showed. She won with ease, finishing in 17 minutes, 19.48 seconds.
“I felt pretty good in the beginning, but the mile’s always hard at the end,” said Swinley, who trains at Curl-Burke when she is home in Reston during the summer. “It gives you confidence being out front … This is kind of an exciting meet at the end of the summer.”
Swinley topped Oakton’s Kaitlin Pawlowicz, 16, who surprised herself with her second-place finish in 17:29.21, largely because she hadn’t swum the event in about two years. Pawlowicz decided to compete Thursday because of her burgeoning interest in open-water swimming; she figured getting accustomed to longer distances could only help her chase that new dream.
With the Curl-Burke Swim Club, she’s dabbled in swims in Virginia Beach, a lake in Charlottesville and Smith Mountain Lake. After Thursday’s result, there likely will be more.
“Our group tried [open-water swimming] last year at the beginning of the school year, and I liked it,” said Pawlowicz, a junior at Oakton High who trains with Curl-Burke. Today “was definitely a really good race for me. I wasn’t really rested for this meet.”
The third-place finisher, Springfield’s Kim Case, 21, meantime, was just happy to have survived with a respectable time of 17:49.18—just 0.63 faster than Curl-Burke swimmer Lauren Levy, 15. Case, who swims at Rutgers, was neither in top form for this competition nor working her way to any concrete goals; she just wanted to see how she felt in the water.
In the past six months, Case has endured broken ribs and debilitating bout with mononucleosis. She fractured the ribs when she slipped on a puddle of spilled suntan oil during a collegiate training trip in Key Largo in January; while trying to swim through that injury, she developed mono during the Big East championships.
She’s been training in recent weeks under Ray Benecki at The Fish.
“I’ve just had it all,” Case said. “I just wanted to see what I could do now, competing a little bit… [The time] was around what I was expecting, though not what my coach wants. He wanted me to go about 30 seconds faster than that.”
Rockville-Montgomery Swim Club’s Ellen Anderson, 15, posted a time in Thursday’s B final that would have given her third place in the A final, finishing in an impressive 17:42.89. Entering the race, Anderson was seeded 15th.
In the boys 800, the only other event contested Thursday, Bishop O’Connell High’s Michael Flach, 18, said he considered this event merely a steppingstone to the prestigious early-August U.S. Open in Washington state. Still, he won the final in 8:22.04 and, he said, hopes to go faster in a few weeks.
“That,” he said, “is a pretty good time for right now.”
Flach topped Curl-Burke’s Drew Finelli, 21, who finished in 8:27.26, and Flach’s training mate with The Fish, Adam Pennington, 17, who finished in 8:36.08.
The race allowed Finelli to get reacquainted with racing after taking a three-month, cold-turkey break from swimming after finishing his conference championships at the University of Alabama. Finelli, burnt out from the sport, considered ending his swimming career right there, he said. But recently he decided to “just suck it up and finish out four years” at Alabama.
“I’ve only been back in the water about four weeks,” said Finelli, who trains under Pete Morgan at Curl-Burke and lives in Fairfax Station. “I pretty much came here to swim and have fun.”
Pennington, meantime, got bowled over by the flu in recent weeks like many of his teammates at The Fish. The team’s biggest star, Kate Ziegler, bowed out of the U.S. swimming championships in Indianapolis last week because of some strain of the flu.
A senior at James Madison High, Pennington said he spent two solid days in bed and had a fever of 102 degrees. He didn’t expect to be at his best here, he said, so he was satisfied with his results.
He is also entered in the 50, 200 and 400 free and the 100 and 200 back, he said. So why, he was asked, did he bother swimming such a grueling event at that start of the meet?
“It’s my best event and my coach made me,” he said. “If it were up to me, I probably would have sat this one out.”
Rounding out the top 10 in the girls 1,500: Caylyn Tate, 17, 17:54.27; Alexi Kuska, 19, 17:56.71; Becky Shaak, 18, 18:13.86; Isa Fillinger, 17, 18:20.39; Elena Marsili, 15, 18:22.53. In the boys 800: Anton Janezich, 16, 8:37.33; Michael Hughes, 17, 8:39.38; Robert Spencer, 16, 8:42.98; Michael Grimmett-Norris, 17, 8:47.80; Serge Gould, 16, 8:50.01; Matt Benecki, 18, 8:50.42; Stephen Seliskar, 15, 8:51.97.
Tags: Kaitlin Pawlowicz, Michael Flach
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