One final dual meet from the weekend that we want to highlight before we turn our eyes toward the coming slate is the Florida-Florida Atlantic dual meet. Normally, this meet would be fairly unremarkable: an exhausted Florida team routs in-state rivals at FAU (178-111 men’s, 169-106 women’s, both with many exhibitions), while both teams learn a lot about their leadership, about racing, and about effort in a tough meet.
This meet, though, had one really head-scratchingly-awesome swim from the Gators. Olympic silver-medalist Elizabeth Beisel has two great events, the 400 IM and the 200 back, but for her third NCAA event she’s sort of bounced back-and-forth between the 200 IM and the 400 IM. While it’s unlikely that she’ll try a mile-200 back double on the third day of the meet, a great result in the 1650 on Saturday shows us….well, something about her distance abilities. She probably won’t ever make this “her race” internationally; the competition in the 500 at NCAA’s is too stiff to make sense for her to pass on the 200 IM.
But a 15:53.22 in the 1650 will give some pause to just how good Beisel really is. That’s a best time for her by 16 seconds (she swam it last year in 16:09), and is the 4th-best collegiate time in the country this year. She was pretty toasted by the end of her race (was able to come down a little to a 28.57), but that’s a headline-time for her. Her only other swim of the meet was a 25.08 freestyle leadoff on the 200 free relay.
The rest of the Gators team was pretty beat down still, though there were some decent marks in context like Sinead Russell’s 50.66 in the 100 free, and a no-exhibition sweep of the men’s sprint freestyles by FAU’s Eric Williams (21.02/45.93); a 49.6 in the 100 fly from Florida freshman Luke Torres that is his season best; and a 2:04.05 from the sprinter Natalie Hinds in the 200 IM to win that race.
She was trying to break the 25-year old school record of 15:50.8 from 1988/1992 Olympian Tami Bruce. It’s the oldest school record on the books at UF. She even suited up for it. Jess Thielmann has a good shot at taking it down this year; she’s already been 15:52 and is still pretty green at swimming yards.
Elizabeth’s a boss, she can do anything.
Elizabeth must continue to work her endurance and her freestyle if she wants to beat Ye Shiwen in the 400 IM in the next years.
she posted on twitter “last mile of my career.” Ha! Wonder if that’s actually going to hold up under Gregg Troy!