Landis to plunge into championships

Sisters-area resident Tom Landis departs this week for the National Masters Long Course Swimming Championships in Omaha, Nebraska.

The four-day meet, which starts on Thursday, features the top masters swimmers from all across the nation. An added point of interest is that this meet is being swum in the same pool as the Olympic Swimming Trials, which just concluded last week. Landis expects to be able to swim in the same pool and same lanes as Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte, though, at age 70, not nearly as fast as the Olympians.

Landis plans to swim six events at nationals: the 1,500-meter freestyle on Thursday, the 400 Individual Medley and 50 Freestyle on Friday, the 100 freestyle on Saturday and the 400- and 200-meter freestyle events on Sunday. For those who are interested in keeping track of how Landis is doing, results and realtime streaming video of the meet can be found at the U.S. Masters meet website, http://www.usms.org/comp/lcnats12/.

Landis, who holds numerous world and national records in the 65-69 age group of masters swimming has now "graduated" into the 70-74 age group and has established himself as the top freestyle and individual medley swimmer in the nation. In April, at the short course masters nationals he won all six of his events and set a national record in the 200 freestyle. Last month he set national records for his new age group in the long course 200-meter Individual Medley and the 5-kilometer swim.

Tom, along with his regular workout partners, Kris Calvin and Scott Miller, has been training particularly hard in the pool at Sisters Athletic Club preparatory to this meet. Landis attributes much of his success to having training partners who push each other in every workout and to having a swim facility which is handy to his home in Camp Sherman.

After this meet, Tom plans to disappear into the mountains for a month of backpacking before returning to the pool to train for open-water races later on in the summer.