Going the Distance

Amy Jones, accustomed to swimming in bursts of 100 meters or less, has been taking the long way to the touch-pad.

The 200- and 400-meter freestyle races have distanced Jones from a slump she appears to have shaken the last three months.

“I’m able to swim a lot of different events and I try to be willing to do different things,” Jones said.

After a sub-par performance in the sprints at the Phillips 66 U.S. Spring National Championships in March, Jones, a senior at Cleveland High, was willing to try anything.

She has a best time of 57.89 in the 100 meters that qualifies her for the U.S. Olympic trials.

But a 29th-place finish in 58.35 in the 100 preliminaries and a career-record time but 76th-place showing of 27.69 in the 50 at the nationals in Federal Way left Jones far removed from the finals.

“She did OK at nationals, but she definitely wasn’t where she could have been,” said Bruce Patmos, Jones’ coach with Canyons Aquatics.

“The level of training and the consistency wasn’t where it should be for an Olympic trials-caliber swimmer.”

In hindsight, Jones had to agree.

“For a while, swimming wasn’t that fun,” she said. “It can get very boring. I’d been coming to workouts and I felt like I was still working hard. I guess I just expected, assumed I would continue to do well.

“But after nationals, I just realized that doing more work was going to be a necessity if I want to see better results the farther along I go.”

The longer races, along with the additions of the butterfly and the backstroke, are part of an effort to improve.

“I hadn’t been swimming that well for awhile,” Jones said. “For the sprints, it’s hard for me to go all out right from the start. It’s so easy to like, choke, where in the longer events you have more time.”

Jones will try to find the times needed to qualify for the Olympic trials in the longer events amid the busy schedule she will keep at the Janet Evans Invitational beginning Thursday at USC.

Jones, plans to compete not only in the 50- and 100-meter sprints, but in the 200 meters and the 100 butterfly.

She has qualified to swim in the 400 freestyle, the 100 backstroke and 200 individual medley, and could compete in any of those events and the relays.

Jones considers her best chance to qualify for the Olympic trials in a second event to be in the 200 meters. She has a best time of 2:05.32. The trials time standard is 2:04.89.

Jones’ top time of 27.69 in the 50 meters also is close to qualifying for the trials; the standard is 26.79. She has bests of 4:28.95 in the 400, where the standard is 4:21.69; 1:05.97 in the 100 butterfly, where she needs a 1:03.09; and a 1:11.29 in the 100 backstroke, where the cut is 1:05.59.

The 200 and 400 freestyles have served as a happy mediums between the sprints, which require explosiveness off the starting block, and the distance events, which test swimmers’ stamina.

“I just wanted to see how I could do in the longer events,” Jones said. “It was just kind of to mix things up.”

The switches, made upon Jones’ return from the disappointing spring national meet early in April, lent some much-needed variety to her workouts.

What remained unvaried were her results.

Selected The Times’ Valley/Ventura County girls’ swimmer of the year in 1999 after winning City Section championships in the 50- and 100-yard freestyles, Jones followed up that performance by winning section titles in two new events in the City finals in May.

She claimed the 200-yard freestyle championship with a time of 1:49.95, and won the 100 butterfly title in 58.28 seconds.

“That was a great meet for me,” Jones said. “The City finals was definitely a highlight of the year.”

Patmos was not surprised.

“Once she came back from nationals, she was real focused and worked real hard, to the point that now she’s going full bore.”

She will need to do so at the Janet Evans Invitational.

The meet is expected to be among the most competitive this year because it is the last major event in which Olympics hopefuls either will be still trying to qualify for trials or will be nearing peak performance levels if they’ve already met the necessary time standards.

“I’m looking forward to it just to experience it,” Jones said. “I feel like I’m ready. I mean, I probably won’t win, but it should be a great experience.”

That’s the long and the short of it.