Well, my trip to Florida is approaching quickly, and we're finally starting to work out some of the finer details. Everyone is allowed to swim one time trial per day, and I'm signing up for the 50 Fly and 100 Fly. However, I'm a little bit nervous. The last time I swam a decent 100 Fly was about six months ago, and I don't want to make a fool of myself in front of all these fantastic swimmers who can consistently kick my butt. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid the shame of coming in last place (and I think I can) since the qualifying time is a few seconds slower than my best, but you never know what kind of shame might occur. At least I'm not in the actual race, which you have to be able to swim in less than a minute simply to qualify for! I can't even imagine what you have to do to win. But, no matter how my race turns out I'm pretty sure I'll have a fun time in Ft. Lauderdale regardless. I mean, it is Florida after all, and I can enjoy it while everyone else is sitting in school back in Iowa. Ha ha ha. And I'll have Harry Potter World to look forward to, which will definitely be the highlight of my trip even if my relay managed to win nationals, Harry Potter wins in my eyes.
My medley relay makes me nervous on a whole different level. We aren't in a time trial. It's the real thing. We qualified nearly six months ago and we really need to pull out a good, no a great time to avoid the embarrassment of coming in LAST place. That can not happen. There was a bit of a confusion at our last championship meet and my whole relay didn't swim together, meaning I wasn't on it. But the other three girls swam fast, which makes me pretty optimistic that we'll end up doing alright at the meet, as long as I can pull out a fast time, too. I've been working a lot on my stroke lately, so I think it's manageable. I don't really think there's a lot of pressure for us to do fantastic overall though. We qualified with a time just a few tenths under the qualifying time, so we'll probably be one of the slowest seeds. And that's okay. There isn't a lot of expectations for us to do super well. No one is expecting us to make it to the finals (the top 24 teams) when we'll probably be seeded somewhere around sixty, so I'm okay if we don't go. The finals are in the afternoon and at night, and I'll spend that time on the beach if I'm not swimming. However the meet turns out I'm okay, as long as we don't come in last place. But recently is was questionable if we were going to be able to go at all.
Due to unfortunate circumstances I missed the state qualifying meet, sectionals, and that put us in a predicament. In order to swim at nationals you have to swim in the state meet, probably some rule to make sure the state meet stays a competition with competitors who still know how to swim, and it seemed like that wasn't going to happen for me. My coach somehow worked it out so I could swim in the last relay (freestyle) and someone else could swim for me at sectionals. So I got to the state meet and we realized that if our team got disqualified our national trip we had already planned would have to be cancelled. So our coach talked to us, "slow, safe exchanges", and I guess we took it to heart. I probably spent a good second and a half on the block after the person in front of me finished. But we didn't get disqualified, and even ended up with sixth place (not very good), nonetheless, everything was okay. Our sixth place meant more, we could go to nationals. And now it doesn't really matter if we make it past prelims or not, the fact that we get to go to the meet at all is enough for me and my team. And obviously Harry Potter is a big part of that
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