Geeky Yet Waterproof

I woke up this morning, wondering why I was alive that hour. Ate breakfast, then somehow made it to the pool. I showed up at practice, bleary-eyed and feeling like a mummy. Then it was time to get in the water — cold and wet. Trying not to fall asleep in the warmup. Why do we always sprint the first 300? It makes the Still-Asleep Factor even worse.



We finish warmup, and I look at the board. Blugh-bralgh-har-graburm?!?

“40 minute swim as far as you can go.” I was being sarcastic yesterday when I suggested we do this!



But there was an extra catch: if we met the requirements in our 40 minute swim, Kate had a fun circuit that we’d do for the rest of practice. If not, well, good luck surviving the last hour and 10 minutes.

The requirements were this: one person had to swim at least 3700 yards in the 40 minutes; three more people had to swim at least 3500 yards; six more people had to swim at least 3300 yards; and six more people had to swim at least 3000 yards.



So our aquatic marathon begins. I start out going faster than I’ll be able to hold for 3500 yards, to make myself think I’m stronger than I am. 10 minutes go by. What the heck is Kate doing? Dancing to the music?? While we’re destroying our slow-twitch muscle fibers??? Another 10 minutes go by, and Kate blows the whistle for halfway. I calculate how far I’ve gone… oh no: 1725 yards. That’s exactly a 25 less than half of 3500! I’ll have to swim faster for the next 1775 yards.

Time goes by, people get lapped, CO₂ is produced… 500 yards to go. 400 yards to go, and four minutes left! 300… 200… 100… 50… EVERYBODY STOP! 3465 yards. You’ve gotta be kidding me. I swam two miles, only to be cheated out of the last 35 yards?!



But it was not so. Kate was regarding everyone’s distance as if they had finished their last 50. I was saved. So, I’d done my 3500… who else? Two other people! And Adam went over 3700. Six more people made 3300, and the remaining six beat 3000.



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The circuit was, as Kate had promised, great fun. In one lane there was a long rope tied at both ends of the pool, and we had to pull ourselves along the rope underwater like at a ski resort; the next lane was swimming with shoes (I was going so slow, I could almost go backwards); the next lane was just practicing dives; the next lane was swimming against stretch cords; the next lane was swimming with a drag suit, which made me feel like a space shuttle just touching down with all its parachutes deployed; and the last lane was also swimming against stretch cords.



So now I have to get up early for Monday morning practice tomorrow. I wonder what we’ll be doing this time…!

This morning at approximately 5:56am I learned how short and easy a 200 butterfly is.



My set was this (my set, because Natascha has gone off to college):

10×100 pull with paddles, free/fly by 25’s
5×250 with fins, 2x{75 fly, 50 free}, negative splitting the fly
3×600, #1 is 600 fly, #2 is 400 fly 200 easy, #3 is 200 fly 400 easy

My paddles kept falling apart during the 10×100’s, so I only got in about 2200 yards of butterfly.



The last set, with the 600, 400 and 200 butterfly, made me worry at first when I saw it, but then it actually turned out to be fun. The first 200 or so of each distance was hard, but then after that my arms just went numb, and there was no more pain! Hurray!



After practice, Kate decreed that tonight, Adam, Allison, Iza, Sammi, and I would get a treat, because we had made all the practices so far this month and done them well. (When asked to elaborate, she said that we’d have it “a little easier” than everyone else.)

Sure enough, we got our treat. She made the five of us do a 1000 kick for time (I got 16:06), but then she took out a 150ft rope and we played — you guessed it — tug o’ war. In the water.

We tried all sorts of crazy combinations, with four people tied to the rope, or people doing different strokes, but it was all great fun. Now think of all the possibilities if we had had everyone playing tug o’ war…

Yesterday was the first day of high school swimming for my second year. I had forgotten how fun high school is: we basically did a warmup, then 10×50 freestyle @50, and then 4×200 stroke drill with 15 seconds rest, and we were done. 50 minutes.



Several people who were on the team last year weren’t swimming with us today for various reasons, some trivial (think, forgetting to get their red card) and some, er, less trivial (such as grades, or lack thereof).

But we also had some new people, including an exchange student from Argentina who is rumored to swim a 100 fly in 56 seconds. Um, long course. If this is true, I fear I may be out of business for the 100 fly at HS State, because that’s my time in yards. But that’s OK, because if our relay team can actually win this year, all that speed will have been put to good use.



After some stroke improvements from last year, and some fast swimmers on the team, I’m looking forward to what should be a good high school season.

This weekend we had our second meet of the season, in Newburg. I swam the 200 IM and 1000 free on Friday, and the 200 free, 100 back, 50 free, and 200 fly on Sunday.

We didn’t have any relays on Sunday, because the only Bearcats there were Amanda, Allison, and I. Oh, and Allison wasn’t swimming.



200 IM: This was a fun race, because my heat consisted of Tori, Kyle, Adam, myself, and one person from a different team. I finished with 2:11 (which is a one-second improvement), and I think we all took 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.



1000 free: Kate gave me an easy strategy for this: go out at some speed, and stay at that speed! So I held 1:06’s for the first 700, and after that it was 1:05, 1:04, 1:03. I ended up getting 10:53, which was a 16-second drop from last year. I’m satisfied.



200 free: I came in 2nd in this race, with a 1:56. The guy I was racing was ahead of me for the first 125 yards — then I pulled ahead by about an arm’s-length, and kept my lead until the last 25, where he out-touched me by about half a second!



100 back: I didn’t even know I was swimming this event until about an hour before. But I ended up getting 2nd, with a 1:02 — right on my best time.



50 free: I don’t remember what time I got in this, but I think it was about .1 faster than last week — 24.something. My best time is 23.89, which I haven’t been able to break since I got it back in December at Husky.



200 fly: I had 5 minutes to rest in between the 50 free and 200 fly. But I think I did alright considering the situation — Al told me to be within five seconds of my best time (which is 2:08). I got 2:13.39, which is 4.5 seconds off my best. I also took 1st, since the next tallest person in my heat was about 5′0″…



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Off topic news: here is another specimen from our team photos last week…

We did our BRSC team photos last night, for the first time in almost exactly two years. We had a professional photographer and it took about an hour and a half, but only about the last 15 minutes were the actual team photos; they decided to do all the individual photos first, which took about an hour or so. BUT, we weren’t sitting around doing nothing for that hour, because a lot of people brought their own cameras, which we used most vigorously. So we actually took more of our own team photos than the photographer did.

I’ve demanded that everyone email their photos to me with the excuse that I’ll post them on the Bearcat site, so you should see them here in a few days. In the mean time, here’s a (rather bad) cell phone picture of what we were doing…





Left to right: Iza, Michelle, Raymond, Adam, Andrew, Kyle, Eamon. Notice how Kyle decided to be Frankenstein and I somehow turned into a werewolf. It must be just that Halloween spirit…

This weekend we had our first meet of the season, in Springfield. I swam the 500, 200 free, 50 free, and 50 fly (that’s right — 50 fly).



In the 500 I got 5:15, which is about 12 seconds off my best. However, I think that’s pretty good considering we had already done 5×500’s that morning.

But then there was the Counting Situation: at the end of the pool is another smaller pool, with about six inches of wall in between the two pools. Normally there’s a plastic floating dock in the smaller pool so the counters don’t have to get wet (or exercise their balancing skills). This time, not so. On each side of the six-inch-wide wall was a rectangular ocean which, to those wearing clothes, was unjustly wet. So the counters had to either try to balance on the wall, or hang on the wall and float in the smaller pool. Like so:







My other races also went well, but there was nothing interesting about them to post here. However, for my own records, these were my times:



50 free: 24.53

50 fly: 26.something

200 free: 1:55

…just very badly burned!



Sorry, couldn’t resist. I’m not actually burned; I’ve just been very busy for the last week because I took a PSAT and had to study, and because I’ve been putting the final touches on a, *ahem* certain alarm clock app which will be released within the next two months and has certain secret features which I will not reveal here *cough*.



Anyway, for swimming news, we have our first meet of the season this weekend, in Springfield. I’m only swimming the 500 tonight, but we’ve already done five of those this morning. Yes, we had practice. I’m thinking I’ll be swimming it for fun tonight, not for records.



More swimming news: we found worms in the showers. Questions, complaints, outrage, contact the janitor.

On Saturday night was the main part of Convention: the banquet. Rowdy Gaines, three-time Olympic Gold Medalist in 1984 (and my coach’s coach), was the MC. They basically played a promotional video of each of the five divisions of US Aquatic Sports (Synchro Swimming USA, USA Diving, US Masters Swimming, USA Water Polo, and USA Swimming), and then had the president of each come up and speak, sometimes calling up some world-ranked athletes of that sport to receive an award. We watched Michael Phelps get awarded Swimmer of the Year. Unfortunately, “his coach wouldn’t let him come”, so we didn’t actually get to see him.

But that all wasn’t the highlight of the banquet: they were playing ancient videos of Adolf Kiefer, Olympic Gold Medalist in 1936, inventor of the modern backstroke, and
seller of kickboards. Then, to my surprise (assuming he had passed away years ago), he appeared in a wheelchair onstage!




Adolf Kiefer




Team Oregon: April, Mailene, Eamon, Chris (Thompson), Trent, Tyler, Logan, Zach



After the banquet, all the athletes had a party to celebrate the end of Convention. But then at about 10:30pm, I remembered somewhat late that we were flying back early the next morning. I called Judy (my chaperone) and asked what time we had to be in the lobby the next day: 5:45am. But then she mentioned that usually none of the athletes go to bed on the last night. I liked that idea, and since it would be a short night anyway (having to be downstairs at 5:45), I decided this was a good time to try staying up.

So after the partying had settled down a little, we all went upstairs and played Stupid Games in the hall on the 2nd floor. We started out with about 30-40 people, but every hour or so, a few more people would give up and head to bed.








This was a card game.



At about 2:30am, the head security guard walked in on our gathering and we all fell silent. Then, to our utter surprise:



“Do you guys need want some drinks or fruit or something?”



The big plate of fruit helped us to stay awake for the remaining hours of our nocturnal (matinal?) odyssey.


By about 5am, we had four people left, and we decided to call it a night (or morning… whatever).



But when I went back to my room to pack, there was an obstacle.



You see, my roommate hadn’t actually been staying in our hotel room all week, since he lived just 20 minutes away (why was he using a hotel room anyway?). Well, that changed on the last night. I went in to start packing, but I couldn’t turn on the lights because he was sleeping! Apple saves the day: I used my iPod as a flashlight.



I met a lot of people at Convention from all over the country (Hawaii, Oregon!, California, Texas, Ohio, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey), including some Olympians and National/World record holders. That’s why I started using Facebook this week, because otherwise there’s no way I’d remember everyone…

I’m really looking forward to next year, which will be in ATLANTA!

I streamed live video of our workshops on Friday (using my trusty PowerBook and iSight), and also recorded it to the web. In the first workshop, I was the one talking about COPPA, which was sort of a bad idea because it was way over both of our heads. The second workshop worked out better though; I was talking about email obfuscation (nobody, including myself, can pronounce that correctly on their first try), which was ironically easier than the COPPA.

You can watch the second workshop below.







I’ve been having a lot of fun this week. It’s literally been workshop, party, long meeting, party, free dinner, party, sleep, party, etc…



On Friday, seven of us athletes took the shuttle to Downtown Disney and ate at the Rain Forest Cafe. We were Ultimate Tourists: every five minutes, we’d ask some innocent unknowing stranger to take our photo. When they would say yes, all seven of us would hand them a camera.

Another thing was that whenever someone asked us the frequently-used question, “So, where are y’all from?”, the answer would come:

“Oregon!”

“Hawaii!”

“New York!”

“Pennsylvania!”











On Thursday night we began a scavenger hunt, commissioned by Tyler Storie. We were split into teams of 3-5, and then each team was given a list of things we had to get by Saturday morning at 8:30am:

• University and Macot name of every NCAA mascot designed by Disney
• Brian Jones’ favorite drink. (Who’s Brian Jones?)
• Middle names of all AEC members. (What does AEC stand for??)
• Jamie Rauch’s wife’s first and middle names. (Who the heck…?)
• Nate Rothman’s flight number.
• Coasters from three different restaurants.
• Signatures from all the BoD vice presidents.
• Team picture in of artwork made of zip-ties.
• Team picture with three Disney Characters.
• Names of the two conferences that will be represented in the 2008 football national championship football game.
• Name of the only Division 1A football program to lose to a Division 1AA football program thus far this season.
• Four different matchbooks.
• Learn and perform, as a team, the “Hotty Toddy”.
• One pair of Mickey Ears.
• One Mickey Mouse trap.
• Gas receipt for $0.01.
• One Halloween costume.
• 10 Facebook message posts on Ali Terry’s wall. (Nobody knows who Ali Terry is.)
• Pictures of team with five different Mickey Mouse representations.
• Picture of team at morning workout.
• At least five different LSC pins.
• Picture of at least one team member wearing Trent’s glasses. (Trent Staley is a vice president of USA Swimming.
• Sand from Laguna Beach.

When Saturday morning arrived, my team had completed a whopping THREE tasks. But believe it or not, we won. All the other teams did even worse than us.


Note: at the time of this writing, we are sitting in the hall eating sugar and drinking caffeine. Oh, and the time is 3:30am. I’ll provide a full excuse for this in my next post.

You may think I’m just sitting around in workshops and meetings getting fat. But ’tain’t true: we (the 25 or so athletes) took the 5:15am bus yesterday to morning practice at the Janet Evans Complex, where the Olympics were held in 1984. It’s a big outdoor pool with yards and meters (don’t ask me). Swimming outside in the dark great fun.

When we got back, we all headed to the Athlete’s Room for FREE! food and beverages.







Later we went to a leadership seminar being led by Dwight Stones, who was an Olympic high-jumper, and the first ever person to compete and commentate in the same Olympics (not to mention the same event). One of the things he talked about was how he, in his Day, fought the organization for what was Right for the sport. He also talked about how winning a Silver medal as opposed to Gold means that you won a Silver medal — not that you’re just the first loser.