Going up against the best in the country — including Olympians and Team Canada Pan-Am Games swimmers — Campbell River teen Mackenzie Padington posted two top-10 finishes and qualified for four finals in the Swim Canada National Championship meet in Montreal last weekend.
Padington, 16, reached the A final and placed 10th in the 400-metre freestyle in 4:24.29 after qualifying eighth with a 4:24.50 time.
She also finished 10th in the 400-metre individual medley, which combines butterfly, backstroke, breast stroke and freestyle strokes, in 5:00.69.
But her strongest showing came in the 400 IM preliminaries, where she was the third-place qualifier in 4:51.49, just 62-hundredths of a second behind Erika Seltenreich-Hodgson, a member of Team Canada’s Pan-Am Games squad.
Padington reached the B finals in two more events, where she added top-20 national results.
She finished fourth in the B final — 14th overall — in the 200 individual medley in a time of 2:20.70, improving on her 15th-place qualifying effort of 2:21.43.
And she finished 10th in the B final in the 200-metre freestyle in 2:06.94, slipping slightly after placing 12th overall in qualifying with a 2:04.83 mark.
Padington did not compete in the 100 breast stroke, an event she won a week earlier in the Canadian Age-group Championships, but swam to a 25th-place finish in qualifying in the 200 breast stroke, in 2:41.02.