The 13th Berlin Master Cup was held again with many international competitors from Germany, Poland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland. For me it was the start in to the competition season 2011, after a half year break since the swiss depth champioship in Herrliberg. I was the only swiss participant so my girlfriend Marianne decided to to accompany and coach me during the comp for a short holiday in Berlin in return. What a deal :-)
The competition was well organized and it was very easy to relax without having to coach fellow competitors. My goal was to have a good time in a good competition. I didn't focus on a top rank or to take back the static record which Nicolas Guerry broke last October, though I knew from the training before I was in a very good shape.
My first official top for static was quite late and I had plenty of time to relax and prepare myself. For Marianne it was the first time coaching in a competition but she did a fabulous job! I started in the second last group just after a remarkable blackout. Being under water, everything went fine and I kept deciding to do another period of time until I reached 8 minutes. At this point I remembered what I set myself as goal: To do a good but safe performance. So I decided to go a couple of seconds past the record from Nicolas and then come up. I got I white card, a new national record for Switzerland and the first place in static doing clean 8:09 minutes. 6 seconds past Nicola's and 20 seconds past my former national record.
With the feeling of having done a good job I decided to go for a good but still comfortable DYN. I like the 50 meter pool in Berlin very much because it feels shortest of all the 50 meter pools I know. Having announced 103m, I turned at 100 and just kept going as long as I felt it to be joyful and did my surface protocol at 135 metres. I kind of felt sorry for Adrian Kwiatkowski who set a new national record for Poland with 206m which was broken by his fellow Robert Cetler doing 212m just minutes after.
I was quite surprised, but happy non the less, to find myself on the 3rd place in the over all ranking though I didn't aim for a rank at all. We had a good party with lots of talks with the interesting new team from Austria at the club home of ntv. I'm curious what the future will bring for the divestyle team.
Marianne and I spent another three days discovering Berlin. I enjoyed to have various brands of beer and berlin "Eisbein" in all the restaurants and bars. But mostly we discovered that berlin in February is freezing cold ;-)
Pictures: Marianne Bosshard, Michael Naef