This last weekend we had our Long Course State Championship meet at Mt. Hood. This State meet was different from ones in the past, for one reason: I am no longer 12, 13, or even 14, but 15-18!
Being at the bottom of a four-year age group has advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that it’s extremely hard to make finals, which means I have only one chance to swim each race. Last year in the 100 fly, I came in 4th. This year, with a time two seconds faster, I came in 28th!
One of the advantages is that it’s extremely hard to make finals. This means that after prelims, I can go back to the hotel and rest, rather than stuffing myself with as much food as I can fit into my stomach, then going back to the pool to swim my races all over again.
The meet was mostly cloudy and a bit chilly, but it was a lot better than last year, which was freezing and raining the whole time. Gotta love outdoor pools.
I swam four individual races and five relays over the course of four days. My individual events were the 100 fly, 200 fly, 400 free, and 400 IM. Our relays were the 200 free, 200 medley, 400 free, 400 medley, and 800 free.
I did pretty well in all my events. I dropped 1½ seconds in my 100 fly, from 1:05.43 to 1:03.87. Later, in the 400 medley relay, I swam the butterfly leg in 1:02.8, which probably could have been a Zone time if it had been an individual race.
In the 400 free, I swam 4:35.33. That was about .3 faster than my best time, which was set at this same meet last year. I know this excuse is starting to get old, but I’m still sort of getting used to my new freestyle stroke.
In the 400 IM, I dropped five seconds, with a time of 5:15.06. Most of the dropped time was in the breaststroke, which was about three seconds faster than when I swam it in Bend a few weeks ago.
In the 200 fly, which was my last event, I dropped about five seconds, with a 2:24.80. I also ditched the breathing pattern I’ve used in every 200 fly for the last three years, because Al thought it was restricting my breathing. Apparently he was right; on my first 50, I could have screamed from the feelgoodness of breathing whenever I felt like it!
Oh, and I forgot to mention: it totally rained during my 200 fly.
In between prelims and finals each day (most of our relays were swum in finals), Adam and Andrew came back with us to the hotel room and we watched YouTube videos… and more YouTube videos… and more YouTube videos… while eating Rice Krispies… and more Rice Krispies… and more Rice Krispies… until we couldn’t stay awake any longer. But the *ahem* less-than-optimal variety of food didn’t seem to have a bad effect, because our relays actually did pretty well. We dropped time in most of them, and I got best times in all of my splits.
This meet was a worthy conclusion to the long course season. I hadn’t been getting any best times for the whole season, and then I finally got them all within four days. But I guess taking off five seconds in a 200 was worth the wait.
Here are some photos from the meet, and a video of my 200 fly. I’m in lane 4.
Joseph and I went to the first annual Ubuntu Live convention in Portland yesterday. (For those who knoweth not, Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux operating system.)
Despite my previous post, I’m still going to say a picture is worth 1000 words, because it saves me from writing!
As you probably know, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the Seventh, the Long-Awaited, the Final Harry Potter Book, was released by J.K. Rowling to us humans today, July 21st 2007, at midnight. So naturally, as most of the known world was partying and drinking lots of caffeine late into the night, we weren’t about to miss the last Harry Potter book release party.
Borders was a (magical) jungle. When we walked in, the first thing I saw was a line stretching from the front of the store to the back. It was the coffee line.
I saw a lot of people I knew, including four Bearcats and a lot of people from the North High School swim team. Though I noticed most of them immediately, they didn’t all recognize me at first sight in my black robe, carrying my Magical Chopstick (10″, and phoenix feather, btw).
But just because we were at the release doesn’t mean we got the book on the first try… To be able to get a Harry Potter book, you had to be wearing a plastic bracelet of one out of six colors. There was one line for each bracelet color, but they were doing just one line at a time.
We didn’t know what order the colors were going in, but people kept looking at our green bracelet and wincing. We had only been waiting for about an hour, but since I had morning practice the next day, we took it as a sign that it was time to give up and come back in 12 hours. Which we did, and we now have two Harry Potter books (that is, until we have to deliver one to a friend tomorrow who was too lazy to get it himself!).
According to my bored calculations, the book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has about 395,454 words, while the corresponding movie has about 198,720 frames. Dividing the number of words by the number of frames, we see that…
We went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a few days ago, and it was definitely one of the best ones yet. A few scenes were missing, but Order of the Phoenix was the longest book up to this point, and the movie would have been about three hours long if they included everything. Anyway, they included Fred and George’s Fireworks Escape scene — what more could you ask for?
If you’re a Harry Potter fan, I command you to go see it.
This weekend we had a meet at Echo Hollow pool in Eugene, and this was one of the smallest meets I’ve been to in terms of Bearcats showing up. It was supposed to be only for people who didn’t go to the Bend meet last week, but I decided to go anyway since I’ve already missed one of our *five* meets this season.
On the last day, I was the only guy (and one of the only people) from our team who showed up, but I hung out with some of the other teams a lot, so it was still fun.
One of the things that made it fun was that we went boating.
We went to an awesome Civil War re-enactment for the 4th of July today at Willamette Mission State Park (I know, wrong war, but who cares). It was 90° out, and the soldiers had to wear all wool clothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if some actually did die.
Photos are below — click ‘em to enlarge ‘em. I’ll probably also be posting a video within the next few days.
