Swim Meet

So Today, I am going to get a little off topic and talk about a swim meet I went to last weekend. It was a prelims/finals meet, which means that qualifying is in the morning and finals are at night. I swam the 100 free, 50 free, and 100 back. My morning sucked. I did really bad. My 100 free was really slow. I went a 57 when my best time was a 54. When I went to talk to my coach after the race, I said that it was really bad, and he said, "Yeah. I had to watch it". He said it was aweful and I knew it was. My 50 was a little better. He told me to go a 24. I went a 24 ... .97. I said to him, "Hey, It was a 24". The 100 back was also pretty bad. I went around my best time. The top 8 from each event go to finals at night. I qualified 7th in the 100 free, 3rd in the 50, and 8th in the 100 back. I was really close to not making it back. I told people, "Yeah I meant to do that. I just wanted to go fast enough to make it back", but actually I tried to go fast. I went home in between the sessions and I was just thinking to myself, "How I am gonna go fast at night". My dad kept telling me that I went really slow, and I said that I was gonna go a lot faster at finals.

Image courtesy of Summer Games

I showed up to finals that day really nervous, but also excited. Warm-up was a bit of a struggle, because the water was so hot. It was like a hot tub. I don't understand why they would pay so much money to keep it that hot. Honestly I would've like it to be really cold than really hot. I tried to keep my mind off how hot the pool was and on how I was going to swim. My first race that night was the 100 free. I went really slow in the morning and knew that I had to redeem myself that night. I was behined the blocks and was really nervous, but in my head all I was saying was, "Lets kick some ass" over and over again. It sounds really dumb, but it worked, because I dropped 5 secounds from the morning. I went a 52. I looked up at the scoreboard and then saw the time I went and I thought, "No way". I didn't think that I could go that fast, but apperently I did. I look over at my coach and there were a bunch of my teameates there and they looked as confused as I did. I was really happy with that. My next 2 races also went really well and it was very good meet for me.

Championships

So we had water polo finals a while back and it went pretty well. For the varsity game however, we lost by 1 point. We played against porkchops team, but he didn't play. I have no idea where he was, but everyone else from that team was there. We started off with the lead and I thought that we could actually win the game, but our third quarter was one of the worst quarters we have ever played. All of us just sucked. We couldn't play defence or offence. I had a really bad game. I couldn't make a single shot. Something was really off with my shot. I should've scored 2 to 3 more goals. There were six on fives where I had a wide open shot from around 4 meters and I just missed the shot. I don't know what was happening. It was probably one of the worst shooting performances I have ever had. In the end it was a pretty good game for the whole team, but the third quarter just killed us. They came back and took the lead from us, and we just couldn't get it back. Our first half was amazing and probably was the best water polo that we had ever played, but the third quarter was just really bad. We almost won, but almost winning isn't winning.

Image courtesy of  Exposure

The JV game went better than the varsity game. We won and got third place in the entire tornement. My shooting was a little bit better than the varsity game, but that was probably because the goalie was a lot worse in the JV game. I scored 4 goals in that game and we ended up winning by 1 point. We had the lead with 40 seconds left in the game, but I thought that there was less time and that I could just hold the ball for the rest of the game. I was wrong. The shot clock was gonna run out before the game ended. I was just swimming around with the ball trying to waste time, when I looked up at the clock and realized that I wouldn't make it to the end, I thought, "O crap, what am I gonna do". The shot clock ran out and there was 5 seconds left in the game. The other team got the ball and started swimming down the pool. Luckily I was all the way down on the otherside so they would have to go the enitre length of the pool to score. At about half way the person with the ball shot it and luckily our goalie blocked it. If that went in, everyone would've gotten pissed at me and I wouldn't have heard the end of it. It was an ok game for us and we got third which was really good. It was a fun season and now I really don't know what to do with my life. Water polo doesn't start again until February and I don't know how I am going to make it through all that time. It's gonna be a struggle.