There are many things that can happen during swim meets that make you feel really stupid or get you really upset. These few examples actually happened to me at a meet just last night against Iowa City West.
1) Missing the wall. This is probably one of the most frustrating things you can do in a race. Here’s how it goes down: You’re up on the block. You’re bent over, ready to grab the block when the announcer says “swimmers…take your marks.” You grab the block and lean back a little to prepare your leverage. You hear the BEEP and push off the block as hard as you can and throw your arms up into streamline. (Streamline is when you have both arms extended above your head with one hand over the other and squeeze your ears with your arms.) You feel the rush of the water and start dolphin kicking as fast as you can as you get closer to the surface. When you reach the surface you break out into freestyle as fast as you can. You can see you’re tied with the girl to the left of you and the girl to the right isn’t too far behind. It’s all up to this turn to get the lead. Then it happens… YOU MISSED THE WALL. You flipped too early and you pushed off of nothing. Now not only did both those girls get ahead of you, but you’re kicking for your life to just catch back up. When you finally make it back to the end, you look at your score and see it’s at least 1 second slower than your normal times. Total disappointment.
2) False starting during a relay. A false start means you jumped off the block before you should have. In a relay, that means you jumped off the block before the person ahead of you touched the wall. When you false start, you are disqualified and your time is not counted. This personally didn’t happen to me last night but to another girl in my relay. But basically, here’s how it happened: Varsity is getting killed. So the JV coach moves down some Varsity girls to the JV relay so that hopefully JV can win and stay undefeated. The last race (400 free relay) is upon us and we’re only ahead by 10 points (JV that is). The first girl hears the BEEP and dives in. She’s swimming fast and gets a slight lead ahead of the other team in the lane next to us. It’s my turn to dive in next. I made a close call on when to dive in, but was still safe. I gain an even bigger lead on the next lane after my 100 and the girl behind me then dives in. The next girl then dives in after her and our lane wins by at least 3 seconds. Which means JV won and is still undefeated right?! Well to our surprise, we were wrong. The third girl had false started and jumped too early so we got disqualified and the final race determined that ICW was the winner.
3) Warm pools. Kennedy’s pool is freezing, just so we’re all clear on that one. Freezing water gives a jolt of energy to your body when you swim while warm water relaxes your muscles. Last night at the Coralville Rec Center, the pool was so warm. This is probably a big reason why we lost. We’re so used to swimming fast in cold water, while ICW is used to the warm water. I guess you could say that they had a ‘home field advantage’. It was really tough for us to swim fast.
Now, there is plenty more that could go wrong during a meet, but this is what had happened last night. It was a tough meet with many obstacles but we intend to take it as a learning experience and work hard to avoid those situations the next time.
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