Also, Lisa Dillman of the L.A. Times interviewed Ryan about his future swimming plans and wrote an article about it. The article is very informative and will be covered in a separate post. http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-swim18-2009jan18,0,6794892.story
Given the overall Grand Prix results yesterday and Ryan's times specifically, it appears that Ryan and most of the swimmers are tired. I've read that swimmers do some of their toughest training over the holidays, and this is probably why the times are generally higher than usual.
A notable exception was Mary Descenza breaking the American record in the 200y fly and nearly breaking it in the 200y back. That is quite an amazing accomplishment, not only given the time of the year, but also because swimming those two extremely difficult events back to back and doing so well is unbelievable. Mary is an amazing swimmer and her accomplishments deserve attention. Hopefully she will continue to do well and qualify for the world championships in Rome. It's a shame that she never made the Olympic team.
Ryan's time in the 100y free was 43.18, which placed him first in the "B" final by nearly 1.5 seconds and would have placed him third in the "A" final had he done better in the prelims. Lisa Dillman wrote the following about Ryan's 100y free performance:
That led to a particularly painful opening race Saturday, the "A" consolation final of the 100 freestyle. His time was 43.18 seconds."Let's just leave that out," he said, smiling. "The 100 free, let's just say I was in so much pain. I've never felt that bad before."
The official results for the 200y back were not available at http://www.socalswim.org/, but swimnetwork.com had the following information:
Olympic gold medalist Ryan Lochte (Daytona Beach, Fla.) also had a strong night Saturday, setting a meet record in the 200y back in 1:39.01. Olympic silver medalist Matt Grevers (Lake Forest, Ill.) was second in 1:40.42 and Adam Ritter (Reynoldsburg, Ohio) was third in 1:44.41.
Ryan broke the meet record in the 200 back. It's a nice accomplishment, although I'm sure he does not care about this one bit because his time was 3 seconds off his American record.
Swimnetwork.com also has videos of the individual races, which can be seen here:
100y free (B final)
200y back (A final)http://www.swimnetwork.com/videos/v/20090118/2009_southern_california_grand_prix_of_swimming___men_s_200yd_backstroke___a_final-16087.html
As for the type of suit Ryan was wearing, Lisa at Daily Reezy told me he was wearing a regular speedo in the prelims and had some type of long legs-only suit on during the finals. In the videos, it doesn't look like a Speedo LZR. Ryan may be trying out a different brand of fast suit or it could be a different type of Speedo that I don't know anything about.
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