Hey kiddos, we had a good weekend in the pool. It was nice to get back to a meet format like last weekend. You all found the strength to power through a grueling weekend of races. A lot of you swam over 10 (some had 13 or more) races throughout the four days of competition. We were awfully proud of each of you with your ability to stay focus on what was in front of you, your ability to move from one race to the next. Apparently our talks on keeping everything in front of you is starting to sink in.
I usually don't put names out there for fear of missing someone, but we do have to shout out to Sadie
Buckley for her new team record int he 400 IM, 100 IM and the 100 back. Our 11-12 girls relay won the 400 free, 200, free, 200 medley and the 11-12 boys placed 2nd in the same 3 relays. Due to the short turn around on Sunday we scratched the 400 medley relay to give our kids time to recover for finals.
It was great to watch all of you supporting each other throughout the weekend, hose will be the memories that you take forward in life.
It's fun to watch you all develop in this area where that clocks becomes more and more relevant over the years. One season your clueless about times, but then you become aware of the meaning and then you discover those motivational time standards, meet qualifying times and then your swimming takes on a new meaning. This new meaning is very healthful but....only up to a point. Time standards or qualifying times while motivating can also become an obsession. Have I lost my mind with this? No. what I am trying to point out and what I saw more then once over the weekend is this, swimmers judging their performance solely on whether they achieved a cut, refusing to accept the fact they've inched closer to that goal with a personal best (PR). Your mind is so set on that result/expectation that you slowly begin to lose sight of everything else.
Something to think about, as you get closer to a qualifying time your margin begins to narrow. While you may be able to achieve a "B" time while having sloppy turns or weak underwater's it will take some fine tuning to go from a B-A-AA-AAA time standard. If you want the same results, do the same thing. If you want to move on you need to change something. A swimmer got out after one of her races and said "I think I could have gone faster". My response was, Then why didn't you? I took my watch out and asked her what are all the numbers, "they are all 0's". Until you finish a race with those numbers you will always be able to go faster.
Always aim High, but at the same time stop and accept your small victories at the same time.
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