Flashes of Panic

I’m back. I could probably write for hours about all the minutia of the meet, from the mechanics of competition-pool warmup to the amusement I (apparently) provided the starters with my starting technique (which I can best describe as “graceless.”) I’ll try to stick to some highlights.

• 500 free: I got an goggle-full of water at the start, but fortunately, only one. It mainly only bothered me on my turns, where I had to close my eyes to avoid my precarious equilibrium from being completely whacked by the sloshing puddle in my eye. It took me about three laps to get settled, and I was moving well enough that I never felt (as I used to about this race in high school) that I would never be finished. In the last three or four laps, I could see the guy inside me in lane six just ahead of me, and I hammered to keep up with him but couldn’t, quite. The fact that I still felt capable of hammering is a good sign.

• I counted laps for the Instigator, who also counted for me. This involves taking a large plastic sign and pushing it down at the end of the pool to show how many lengths have been completed—1, 3, 5, etc. to 17; then instead of 19 both digits are blocks of orange: last turn. I used the sign also to telegraph to him his progress relative to some pre-set split times he hoped to hit. Side-to-side, no, out too fast. Up and down, yes, pick it up now. He was out a bit quick, less than a second, but then he faded. “Not enough distance base,” he explained.

• 100 breaststroke: Another goggle-full of water, but in this race, it doesn’t matter all that much. All you need to see is the wall. I did a decently-good job of maintaining effort through the race. My brother said, “That looked like it was painful.” I thought he was talking about the race, but it turned out he was talking about my start.

• Laugh-till-you-choke moment: in an attempt to refuel between races, I tried a U-Turn bar. Talk about frightening names for something to eat. “How did it taste?” asked my sister-in-law’s friend Heather. “I mean, the first time?”

• 100 free I was in the third of… I don’t know, twenty-three heats? As usual, I was the youngest in my heat, the only one under 40, in fact. This time I got a clean start and had close competitors on both sides to race with. I thought I did pretty well, for the third race of the day. I should note that in this event, I was not last.

• My brother missed his Friday heat of the 100 butterfly, so instead he took a liberal interpretation of the “free” in “freestyle” and swam fly instead. (Crawl happens to be the fastest stroke, so “freestyle” is usually the same as “crawl”—but not necessarily.) His time would have placed him fifth if he’d done it Friday, but he was probably more tired on Saturday.

• The title of this post comes from a shirt I spotted on deck. I didn’t feel all that tired, myself, until I was driving home.

I told my sister-in-law afterward that from a March perspective, I thought I could have done better, but from a January perspective (when I started training) it had gone remarkably well. We agreed that I could easily have shaved a bunch of time had I been better with things like starts and turns. And, I observed, “I wonder how I would have done if I’d started training in November instead of January?”

I’ll have to see how running is going. If I’m still gimping around next fall, I might have to start early on my New Englands training.