South Lincs Competitive Swimming Club talent Mollie Briggs continued her impressive development by competing in the Swim Wales Open Water Meet at Pontypool last Saturday.
The event also served as the British selection trials for the European Junior Open Water Championships and attracted some of the best distance swimmers in the country to fight it out for a junior international selection.
Held at Llandegfedd Lake, Briggs was participating in the 7.5km race in the 16/17 years age group.
She managed to take a 19th place finish overall in the group, but placed 12th amongst the 16-year-old swimmers – very much matching her finishing position of 11th at the Nationals in 2019.
The 7.5km course took her 1.49.11hrs to complete.
This was the first time Briggs had taken on the distance as, due to competition restrictions over the last 18 months stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, no open water competition has been held.
Briggs had been in preparation for the event for a month and had been undertaking not only her regular pool-based training, but also swimming at Tallington Lakes in order to adjust to the open water.
That included two-hour sessions in a wetsuit and also without to adjust to the water temperature.
With the official temperature at Llandegfedd coming in at a cool 20 degrees centigrade, the race was declared a skins event, so swimmers were only permitted to race in a swimming suit rather than a wetsuit.
Briggs went on to brave the cool temperature of the lake for just under one hour and 50 minutes as she raced five times around a 1,500m course.
She began strongly with three solid laps of the course and managed to avoid getting caught in any packs of swimmers and kept herself out of any trouble – open water can be quite physical at times.
Briggs ended up in a pack of just four swimmers fighting it out for their positions and worked hard through the fourth and fifth laps, getting the better of one swimmer who was soon dropped from the group of four.
However, she was outpaced in the final lap with two swimmers in her group pulling away.
South Lincs head coach Keith Haynes said: “This was a huge learning experience for Mollie as it is the first time she has taken on a race of this distance.
“We’ve learned a lot and are going to go away and start preparations for the event in 12 months when Mollie has another chance of making a junior international selection.
“Mollie should be very proud of herself, we are a small-town club and Mollie was competing against swimmers from some of the best distance programmes in the country.
“We will be working hard to give Mollie every opportunity to be competitive next season in these distance events.”
