How long has it been since I posted something on the same day it happened! :-)
We went to a swim meet! Our first meet since February of '09.
Our daughter has started swimming with the masters -- people who have aged out of college-age swimming.
The meet today was just for fun -- all relays and some silly events, like a kickboard relay and a tshirt relay. Until the kickboard relay, I'd never heard of a swim relay where an object was exchanged. (All four members of one relay team used the same kickboard.) At least you can't drop a kickboard...... That is, you can let go, but it doesn't fall down below the level at which is is used..... :-)
I'd never heard of a tshirt relay, either. All members of a team have to wear the same tshirt. Sequentially! You wear the shirt. You swim your 50 yards, touch the pad under the blocks that keeps time, then climb out and "hand off" the shirt to your next teammate, who has to wear it to swim her/his leg.... (the yellowish rectangles below the blocks on which the swimmers in orange are standing, with the black plus sign on them, are the touch pads)
(The photographer/journalist would like to thank whoever put orange tshirts on these people -- that makes it MUCH easier to see what's going on!)
Here go the first swimmers.
I was thinking they'd be losing huge amounts of time swapping the tshirt, but my daughter's team had a brilliant idea.
The person who just swam, and the person who will swim next put their arms on each other's shoulders, and the top of their heads together, and their other two teammates pull the shirt right off the one who just swam onto the one who will swim next.
How smart is that???
And they practiced ahead of time, too. :-)
The shirt is coming off the guy who swam second, and going on to my daughter, in the dark blue cap at left.
Transfer complete; she is ready to go.
Switching the shirt from my daughter to the guy who will swim the 4th and final leg. You can see him at left -- light blue cap and sort of flowery? suit (just under the blue diving-board diagonal).
Now he's ready to go. Note other teams struggling with the shirts.....
The swimmers are looking at the scoreboard.
I think this was the closest event of the whole meet. Our team came in second.
Masters swimming is broken down by age. Our daughter was the only swimmer, today, who was under 25, so she automatically won all of her events. She actually was the fastest woman in the 50 free today. The meet was small enough that no events were broken out by gender. Only two men went faster in the 50 than she went. Pretty good, after taking more than a year off, and only starting back in the pool this fall!
We enjoyed the meet. It was nice to have it be so low key.
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2 comments:
Love the t.shirt transfer! That must have been a lot of fun to participate in AND watch.
It was certainly fun to watch! :-)
Before the race started, one team had a non-compliant tshirt. :-) (It was synthetic, rather than cotton, so too easy to get on/off when wet.)
They had to get a compliant tshirt before they were allowed to compete.
:-)
I think my daughter thought it was fun -- she reported it was MUCH harder to get out of the pool, dragging along a soggy tshirt.
:-)
The last time we went to a meet, it was a Division III college end-of-regular-season meet. Lots of the swimmers at that meet went on to compete at the DIII nationals.
I was struck, yesterday, by how ... slow ... many of the swimmers were. :-)
We have been accustomed to a very high level of talent/skill. (One of my daughter's high school teammates swam for the US in the Olympics, in 2004 and 2008.)
I have the greatest respect for all the swimmers yesterday -- I'm sure the very slowest of them went faster than I would have been able to go at any time in my life.
It was different to watch, though.
I took video, at that last college meet, of the fastest heat of men swimming the 50 yard freestyle.
Those 8 guys basically pushed the pool ahead of them as they swam across. An enormous amount of water got moved........
Yesterday was much more ... low key.
:-)
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