Lucas Punkari
With just over a month to go until the Canadian age group championships in Montreal, soon to be 17-year-old Donovan Taylor is hoping his results at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club Long Course Championships held June 10-13 will help him towards a strong showing at the nationals.
“It was a really good experience,” Taylor said of his trip to Baltimore.
“It was a little bit different than the usual meets because the preliminary events were held in the indoor pool, and then the finals were held outside, so I had to get used to that,” he explained.
“But it’s good to experience that because when I compete in Montreal, that meet will be held outdoors, as well.”
Taylor, who turns 17 on June 30, swam in eight events at Baltimore, with his best showing being a fourth-place finish in the 200m I.M., where he had a time of 2:15.64.
“I was a little disappointed with that one because it’s my favourite race and I was hoping to be up there in the top three,” Taylor admitted.
“Overall, it was a fairly good race, technique-wise, and I just have to work on a few minor adjustments,” he added.
His other top finishes included a fifth-place in the 100m fly (1:00.68) and a pair of sixths in the 100m free (55.71) and the 200m back (2:18.55).
“I really wanted to go under the minute mark in the 100 fly, but it just wasn’t in the cards that weekend,” Taylor sighed.
“I was proud of my swim in the 100 free, as that is not one of my speciality events, and the 200 back was also a good race,” he added.
The final of the 200m back also presented an interesting issue for Taylor as he had to contend with a couple of different situations in the water.
“As soon as I dove in, myself and the guy to the right of me both pulled underneath the lane ropes, and our hands were smacking each other, leaving us both going, ‘What’s going on,’” he explained.
“For me, it ended up being a 225m backstroke as I was wiggling back and forth, with no straight line to follow on the ceiling as all I could see when I looked up was the sky.”
That’s something Taylor’s coach and mother, Dawnn, will be working on in the lead-up to the nationals at the end of July as the training process begins yet again.
“As I told him, we’re going to be working on getting his ‘spidey senses’ working,” she smiled.
“Over the next month, I’ll be having him do some blind swims at the pool here, where I’ll be blacking out his goggles and making sure that he works on his bilateral swimming.
“It’ll all be about getting his senses stronger, especially going into Montreal, where he’ll be going into similar conditions [as] what he faced in Baltimore,” she added.
However, one of the conditions Taylor doesn’t want to experience again is the stormy weather that sprang up during the course of the weekend in Baltimore, which led to chaos around the outdoor pool.
“Whenever they had shorts bursts of showers and thunderstorms, they would have to evacuate the whole building,” he recalled.
“You had to go to your car and they wouldn’t allow you on deck or anything like that, and that situation happened three or four times while we were there, so that was pretty different.”
In his four other events there, Taylor finished eighth in the 100m back (1:05.23), 10th in the 200m free (2:02.91), 12th in the 400m I.M. (4:57.39), and 17th in the 200m fly (2:29.59).
Heading into the competition, Taylor was recovering from a left ankle injury he suffered after sliding off the medal stand at the Thunder Bay May Invitational. But it turned out the ankle was not an issue at all once he arrived in Baltimore.
“The ankle held up really well,” he noted.
“That injury really didn’t help a whole lot with my training before the meet, as we kind of took it soft on the ankle so it would heal up,” he added.
“As a result, I wasn’t quite in the peak condition I was hoping to be in for the meet, but it was still moderately good.”
While Taylor and a contingent of swimmers from Thunder Bay were nowhere near setting any personal bests during the meet, both Dawnn Taylor and Thunderbolts’ coach Stewart McLean felt their swimmers’ overall performances were still strong.
“If nothing else, they realized the reality of the situation they were in,” Dawnn Taylor explained.
“We talked to them about the fact that while you’re not anywhere close to getting your best times, no one else is, either, and if you’re getting within two seconds of your time while everyone else is five seconds off, you are ahead of the game,” she reasoned.
Although Donovan Taylor could have competed at the Ontario or Manitoba long-course provincial championships at the start of July for his next meet, it was decided it would be better to get him training and focused on getting ready for the meet in Montreal at the end of the month instead.
“We thought about those two events, but we decided in the end to just focus on straight up training and just concentrate on Montreal,” Dawnn Taylor said.
