RTSC Gala Reports

Saturday 26th/Sunday 27th November - DSE Short Course National Championships - Ponds Forge, Sheffield

This weekend Romford Town’s 13 years old Amy Marren was competing against the senior swimmers at Disability Sports Event short course Nationals at Sheffield’s Ponds Forge pool.

This competition was compulsory for many of Great Britain’s top swimmers to attend in preparation for the Paralympics trials at Stratford’s Aquatic Pool next March. Amy’s focus for the trials will be to try to achieve the Games qualifying standard to put herself in the frame for selection in the S9 classification.

She produced some outstanding performances this weekend in each of her four individual events, recording sizeable PB’s each time out whilst still maintaining a heavy training programme. She smashed her previous best over 100 metres Freestyle to take a bronze in her S9 category, with a time of 1min 05.76. She followed this up by taking three seconds off her previous best 100 metres Backstroke to take silver with a time of 1min 13.14secs.

There was another S9 silver for Amy from a gritty 400 metres Freestyle swim, where her time of 4mins 52.84secs brought her to within one second of GBR swimmer 18 years old Lauren Steadmen. She did, however, get the better of Steadman for the first time ever with a time of 31.23secs over the 50 metres Freestyle as Steadman was more than half a second behind with 31.79secs.

Of the two relay events in which Marren took part she picked up another bronze as one of the London regional quartet in the 4 X 100 metres Freestyle team.