Wednesday I put my name in the hat to swim the 50 freestyle. I had a rough time from the pool but you can't be entirely accurate since we don't have blocks at the pool at 24 hour fitness. I thought I could do a 35 to 40 second swim (which is not all that great). We had a guy in my age group that could probably get 1st or 2nd but he had been swimming all week for the event and we also get points for having as many different people to participate as possible, so I was up.
I've never really taken off from the blocks for swim meets... I mean, up to 5 years ago I couldn't do my first tri at 700 yards without side stroke and back stroke. I practiced a few times taking off from pool side in the practice lanes and Boom, I was ready to go. To say it's a little intimidating standing on those blocks 3 to 4 feet off the water line is an understatement. I was hoping for a non-belly flop entry. I'm not sure what it looked like, but when the buzzer sounded I launched and kept the goggles on and no belly flop. Finished with a 30:58, 33rd in my age group. Mission accomplished. Not bad also considering I don't do flip turns due to ear problems. Maybe I can try to improve next year... who knows.
Tug of war is usually our event that we get 1st or 2nd every year. We have a good method down and usually have a good supply of eager participants. We have to have a team under 2000 pounds. Usually we end up with 12 people. Hallmark Cards in a different division gets 14 people... 14... to weigh less than 2000 pounds. That's some skinny people! We had 12 and weighed EXACTLY 2000 pounds. EXACTLY! I thought that would be a good omen for the event, but I wasn't really prepared for what we would face Saturday.
We faced some tough teams and with no excuses, we ended up in 4th place. 1-3 were good teams, so it's nothing to be ashamed of, but I thought for sure we were ready for gold again. Oh well. In the grand scheme my company ended up in first place overall for our division for the 7th year in a row, so there's some silver lining. I hate to lose, but there's not much you can do about the past.
Wish I had some pictures to post. We took some videos of the tug of war so I'm hoping to get them on youtube. For now, here's a snap of what we looked like last year when we got first.
Amazingly enough with all of that going on, I managed to get a solid week of training in. Right now I'm in "maintain" mode for IM Branson and it's a nice base for the Shawnee Mission Park tri and Midwest Mayhem coming up in 2 and 3 weeks.
Stay tuned for operation "Finish the dang basement" details from this coming holiday weekend. Dad is coming up again hopefully to get this sucker knocked out. I've been sanding and mudding when I can to be ready to fly on the ceiling grid when he gets in... we shall see how smooth this goes. =)
1 comment:
That sounds like some very fun activities! Congrats to your team!
Post a Comment