swim meet, the interlude

We were seriously spoiled by high school swimming.

You come, you swim, you cheer, you go home. There is someone from your team swimming in every heat of every event, so if you are not swimming, you are cheering.

There are only 10 events, so unless there are a ton of divers (diving takes a lot longer than any swimming race, as each diver dives several times in a meet), the meet may be over in a couple of hours. Even when there are 90 girls on your team and each girl swims in every home meet.

College swim meets take much longer. There are more events (200 back, fly, breaststroke in addition to 100 of each, say). There are more genders, so there are twice as many "more events" as there would have been in high school (where the genders swam in separate seasons). Big meets tend to have prelims, with lots of heats, and finals, with only two or three heats of each event. Between the boys and girls, last weekend's prelims had 13 heats of the 500 free, at about 5 minutes per heat..... College meets also have longer events, like the 1650 (or "mile" :-) ), and like a 4x200 (known as the 800) free relay (at about 7 minutes, plus, per heat).

College meet prelims seem to be in the mornings, and finals in the evenings.

It is nice for swimmers to have time in the afternoon to rest and eat and rest. (Or maybe that's "eat and rest and eat"....)

Spectators can also eat and rest (rest their throats from cheering, maybe, and stretch out their backs/shoulders/necks from sitting on bleachers for several hours....). And maybe go back, from Gambier, Ohio, to Mt. Vernon, Ohio, where their motel is, and check in. And be grossed out by how icky it is, as, in fact, we did and were. Ah well.


Mt. Vernon is a very pretty little town. It was clearly very prosperous 100 years ago (or whenever the large and fancy houses were built), and it is clearly prosperous now, as most of the houses seem to be well maintained, which is a lot of work when there is as much decoration to maintain as many houses have.

This is a small, ordinary house, but look at the gingerbread! (I apologize for the glare on the lens. Sigh.)





The downtown and the public buildings also appear to have been built in prosperous times, and to be maintained well at present.





Love the roof on this house.....





Ok. Let's leave Mt. Vernon and head back to Gambier. (It is too windy and chilly for me to want to spend any time strolling, regardless of the charm of Mt. Vernon.)

Gambier is a very short drive from Mt. Vernon. And is a very (very) small place. There is really nothing there but Kenyon College (1700 students). Nothing. No grocery, for example.....

Kenyon is pretty much right where you see the evergreen trees at the bottom of the sky in this image.





This big sycamore is at the bottom of the hill in the previous shot. There are a lot of big sycamores in central Ohio. A lot more than there are around Ann Arbor. I wonder why.....

They are very dramatic, with their white branches against the darker bark of their neighbors.





Kenyon College, like Mt. Vernon, appears to have been and still be prosperous. It is a very pretty little college, in a very pretty hilly, wooded setting.





I'm not sure why I didn't get any more pics of Kenyon, but I didn't.


Our motel was nasty enough that we preferred to wait for the evening swim finals at the nice, clean, comfortable Kenyon athletic facility.

There are cushy chairs in niches at the far end of the building from the pool, overlooking the indoor track, which has a lacross/soccer/cricket field in the center.

We sat there on Friday afternoon, and one of us had a nap.

Kenyon places a lot of emphasis on athletics (as you might guess from the fact that such a small place has such a nice big facility). They are justly proud of their accomplishments, and the facility celebrates past triumphs as well as supporting current efforts in high style.