50 Meters Is a Long Way

The kids squeaked out a win at Saturday’s swim meet, holding on to win by 3 points.  Both kids shaved time off their backstrokes but the lack of practice clearly showed for Ben.  Both kids have been at daycamp for the last two week but Kate’s age group still has swim lessons every day, so she’s been getting some practice in.  Ben, on the other hand, has not.  He posted a marginally lower time on his freestyle but was five seconds slower on his fly than the first time he swam it!  Supposedly he’s going to swim after camp to try to keep up but we’ll see how that resolve holds up in the face of all the other kids playing at the pool when he’s swimming laps.

But I’m getting distracted from the REAL highlight of the meet, which was Kate’s leg of the medley relay.  Since the meet was so close, the coaches were trying to get as many points as they could.  The other team didn’t have a 13-14 girls medley relay team, so our coaches cobbled together a team, consisting of one 13 year old, two 9 year olds, and Kate.  Now keep in mind that that age group requires swimmers to swim 50 meter, and Kate had only ever raced 25 meters before.  But the coach asked her, and she gamely said yes after making sure that she was swimming freestyle and not one of the other strokes.  She got tons of encouragement from the older kids.  One older girl told her that since she was swimming freestyle, she would be fine so long as she didn’t stand up, and that she couldn’t be disqualified for anything else.

Her face when she touched the wall to turn around essentially said, “I can’t believe I have to swim all the way back.”  At one point, she turned her torso so much to take a breath that she did a complete revolution in the water, but she barely paused and just kept swimming.  And she finished, snagging 7 points for her team!

After the meet was over I asked her how she felt when the coach asked her to swim that event.  She said, “I wanted to say no, but I was hot and wanted to swim to cool off.”  Classic Kate!