You'll recall from the last two years that it has been customary for us to spend the first weekend of December in Ohio. There are a couple of big swim meets at colleges in Ohio. This is the third year in a row we've gone to the meet at Kenyon College.
It's about 3.5 hours from Ann Arbor.
It was cold, and the sky was dramatic, but it didn't precipitate on Thursday.
I missed a turn in Findlay. The road goes to Dayton, and if you want to go to Columbus instead, you need to make a serious right turn. Which is totally counter-intuitive -- Columbus is *east* of Findlay, as you head south....
If there were signs prior to the turn, I didn't see them. I only saw the one that said "turn here," and I was in the left lane waiting to bear east, and it was too late.
It took quite a while to recover from that (we couldn't get off I75 for 10 miles!).
So it was later than we had planned when we got to Mt. Vernon and checked in to the very nice Comfort Inn there. From Mt. Vernon, we headed on over to Gambier, which is just a few minutes farther east. (Gambier is so extremely tiny that there is no grocery store, and certainly no hotel. There are some rooms at the Kenyon Inn, but those were full of swimmers..... Luckily Mt. Vernon is much bigger, quite nice, and only a few minutes away, via motor-powered transportation.)
Kenyon has a gorgeous athletic facility, which houses this nice pool. (Too bad the air is so very cold. This year even the spectators in the bottom couple of rows were too cold, and it was even worse for the swimmers!)
If the only time you see swimming is the Olympics, you don't get a sense of how chaotic a normal swim meet is. Each swimmer needs to find out and keep track of what to do and where to go (there are sheets up on the wall, and usually there are also handouts, detailing who should be in which lane for which heat of which event).
When not racing, swimmers are warming up, cooling down, cheering for their teammates, chatting, and eating. Always eating. It takes a LOT of calories to keep a swimmer fueled. I water-colored this image to obscure the identities of the swimmers, which makes it hard to tell what you're looking at, but this pic shows cookies and energy drinks as well as lots of clementines. I'll guarantee there's a lot more food invisible inside all those bags.
Thursday night was the mile, and the 800 (4x200) freestyle relay.
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2 comments:
Don't you just hate that when they have the exits so far apart! There is hwy up in British Columbia (Coquihalla) that once you get on it (which we did by accident one time) you're on a bridge and your stuck for I think it was 30+ miles before the exit....
I used to love swim meets as a kid. :) My snailmail address is: Tammy Knight 25621 174th St. S.E. Monroe, WA. 98272 Thanks!
I do hate when they have the exits so far apart. Especially when there's a major turn of the sort that I missed...............
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Guess I shouldn't complain -- better 10 miles than 30!
I've been through that "fork" before, but didn't remember that it was so poorly marked. Someone told me that they'd been working on that, over the summer, and maybe some of the signs that used to be there are no longer........
Just SEE if I let him sleep, the next time I'm going through Findlay! Unless I'm going to Dayton, of course, and then it's a piece of cake...........
Swim meets for big kids are WAY less work than for little ones. They are shorter, for one thing (each race so much shorter), and then the kids are big enough to manage where they're supposed to be, so you don't have to follow them around making sure they're in the right place at the right time.
We were spoiled by high school, though, where a long meet is 3 hours...... :-)
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