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Warrender were well represented on Day 2 of the British Championships in Manchester Tuesday with several swimmers contesting finals and semi-finals.  With the meet set up to mirror the time schedule of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, today's swimmers faced the challenge of competing in morning finals commencing at the somewhat early time of 8:00am.  This meant arriving at the pool at about 6:30am for the warm-up, and although all top level swimmers are used to getting up and swimming early in the day, producing one's peak performance at that time is widely thought to be difficult. 

And so it proved, with the majority of finalists swimming slower than they had gone in the heats the night before.  This was the case with Lewis Smith who while still swimming a well paced race, was adrift of his outstanding 3:55 heat time in the 400m freestyle final, instead finishing in 6th place in 3:59.04.

Helen McRoberts took to the water in the women's 400 IM junior final.  Her heat time was also not to be matched but she did put in an excellent effort to finish 6th in 5:04.76, just one second slower than her personal best from the heat.  Commonwealth Games representative Fiona Booth was in action in the semi-finals of both the women's 50 butterfly and 100 breaststroke.  However, times of 29.17 and 1:14.69 were not fast enough to progress her to the final.  Billy Purnell swam very close to his lifetime best (58.01) in the men's 100 backstroke semi-final (58.17) but alas, it was only good enough for 9th place overall so he just missed out on a final berth.

The finals session ended with the men's 4 x 100 freestyle relay event.  Lewis Smith led off for the boys in red with a new personal best of 53.90, and was followed by Billy Purnell (54.99), Andrew Haslett (57.52) and Ewan Johnston (54.63) to finish in 3:41.04 and take 5th place overall.

After a well earned rest, some of the squad were in action again at the afternoon heats session.  Lewis, Billy and Ewan all contested the men's 200 IM.  Lewis swam a well controlled race to win his heat and qualify in 3rd place overall for tomorrow's semi-finals in 2:05.33, just 0.24 shy of his lifetime best.  Billy's time of 2:09.52 was unfortunately not fast enough to progress but Ewan's swim of 2:09.56 knocked one second off his previous best and qualified him in 4th place for the junior final on Thursday morning.