.21 seconds doesn’t seem like much, but in men’s swimming it make all the difference in earning a meet record as the men’s swimming broke a nine year old Grinnell Invitational meet record.
Going into the Grinnell Invitational on Jan. 20 in Grinnell, Iowa, the four members of the men’s swimming 400 meter freestyle aimed to finish high in the relay. Instead, the relay broke a meet record.
The relay team of sophomores Bryan Haage and Jared Ekberg, junior Jacob Speechley and senior Ian Disteldorf won the relay with a time of 3:11.71.
Disteldorf said they weren’t even aware what the meet record was until the team broke it, and said it was a good indicator for how the rest of the season can go.
“Going into Grinnell, we had no idea what the record was, but we wanted to swim really fast,” Disteldorf said. “It’s [breaking the meet record} is huge. We didn’t know that we were close to our record also. When we looked at the board, we all thought ‘wow we can totally crush that record.’”
Going into the meet, Ekberg said their goal was to help the team to a good overall team finish. Although the team wanted to finish second in the meet, they placed third with 891 points but were only one point behind second Nebraska Wesleyan University who finished with 892 points.
Haage went first in the relay, getting the team off to a solid start with a 48.35 seconds split. Then it was to Disteldorf who split 49.25, to Ekberg who split 46.83 and then Speechley who finished the relay with a 47.28.
The current Augustana 400 yard freestyle relay record, 3:06.27 minutes, was set last year and held by three of the swimmers who broke the Grinnell Invitational meet record. Those three are Haage, Speechley and Ekberg.
Going forward towards conference, which will be on Feb. 9-11, the Vikings feel they could break the school record.
“To me, it [breaking the record] is a good sign at this point in the season that we did that because it shows that we will be ready to do our best at conference,” Haage said.
The men’s swimming CCIW  conference meet will be at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois.
The Augustana Grinnell relay team went up against some of the CCIW competiion this past weekend as they  battled with North Central and Wheaton at the Wheaton Tri-Meet at Wheaton in Wheaton, Ill.  Augustana finished with 189 points and 125 points.
The 400 meter freestyle relay team was put into the 200 meter freestyle relay for this meet winning with a time of 1:28.39 minutes. Although they didn’t break a meet record in this relay, they were only four seconds away from the school record they set last year.