Yo Elvis Does A Great Job
Yoelvis “Joey” Pedraza finished fifth at today’s USA Swimming National Open Water Swimming Championships. But, more importantly, he was able to self-analyze his own actions during the race and identified what he did well and what he can continue.
His passion for the sport and vis-a-vis his own improvement is impressive.
“I did ok, but the top three guys were very clever. The got everyone by surprise and did not feed for the last 4 laps, and they made a very large gap between everybody. That was my first mistake. I fed on the third lap, but then I did the same thing the leaders did and didn’t feed for the rest of the race. I just tried to catch up. We left our pack behind and took off to chase the other guys.
I felt like my pace was smooth the whole time, but we got tired when we started chasing the top three.
It was only two of us, me and Jordan Wilimovsky, side by side for 3 laps alone. But Jordan also surprised me at the end with his sprint. I was looking the wrong way and not focused on him. He started to sprint before I did. It was a good race the whole way. It was definitely a learning experience.
The pace at the beginning was very slow, I felt like a lot of new people were trying to get ahead of us and didn’t know what they were doing and they would pick us the pace and then slow down, and people started hitting each other, it was “arroz con mango” (chaos) at the beginning. And when they dropped we started to move up.
I’m learning more and more as I go to more races.”
And we like his upward trajectory. He has the desire and commitment to continue to improve.
Copyright © 2013 by Open Water Swimming
