Busy

This has been a crazy busy week. Two writing classes this week, lots of end of quarter stuff at work, PyCon, a swim meet, and some family stuff. I feel like I’ve been going non-stop. PyCon deserves its own post, and it will get one, but not tonight…

While you’re waiting for that PyCon post (and more posts to come about my experiences learning to program), I’ll let you know that I qualified in another swimming event this weekend. I swam the 200 breaststroke for the first time ever (this is not a high school event). I always thought I might have made a good 200 breaststroker (it is a college event, I didn’t swim competitively in college) because I am not really a sprinter. I am pretty good at pushing a pace consistently over a medium-long distance. Or at least, that is what I discovered when I was running (post-college, and before I returned to swimming).

There was evidence of this in my high school swimming career. I could never manage to get my 50 breaststroke consistently under 38 seconds, either during my leg of a medley relay (the only time you swim 50 breast in high school), or on the first leg of my 100 breaststroke race. I thought I would get the opportunity to break 38 seconds this weekend, but it turns out this weekend the events were 200 and 100 breaststroke (no 50). So… next weekend…

But, the big news from this weekend: I dove in and swam a 2:55.23 for the 200 yrd breaststroke! That beats the qualifying time for my age group (2:58.03) and also beats the goal time I had posted on the side of my fridge (2:57.57).

So, having “blown away” my original goal times for both the 200 and the 100 breaststroke, I needed to come up with some new times… Here are my new goal times:

• 50 breast — 37.55 (no change to this one… yet…)
• 100 breast — 1:18.65 (was 1:22.57)
• 200 breast  — 2:49.57 (was 2:57.57)

Those all seem like rather ambitious goal times, but so did the other ones when I made them, and I can rationalize these times (except for the hundredths, I just made those up). So, I’m just going to re-set the bar even higher and see what happens.

Next weekend is the March Madness swim meet at University of San Francisco. I’m registered to swim the 50 breast, the 100 breast, and the 100 IM. I have a secret hope (not so secret now, I guess…) that I will be able to swim a qualifying time in the 100 IM (1:14.27). But it’s my last race of the day, and I’m going to need to get my sprint on in the 50 if I want to get my time below 38 seconds. We’ll see what I have left…

The March Madness meet is my last meet before the Pacific region championship meet. So far I haven’t decided if it’s worth flying to Indy to swim in the Nationals. I can’t decide if I want to fly out there to get my butt kicked by crazy fast people. I got a taste of getting my butt kicked (or at least touched-out by) crazy fast people at the meet this weekend in Palo Alto. I was the youngest person in my heat, the “fast heat,” of the 100 breaststroke, and I finished 6th overall (2nd in my age group). At least in the 200 breast two of the five women who beat me were significantly younger than me (again I finished 6th overall, but this time 1st in my age group).

Note: these are just the crazy fast people that happen to live / compete in the Bay Area. Then again… If I race Nationals, it does give me one more month of training to help me get my times down… So maybe the crazy fast people will still beat me, just not by as much, and I may be able to sneak in to the top ten times…

Let’s just see how I do this weekend. Then I’ll decide. It’s not like I don’t have enough on my mind right now…. I’m just going to focus on what I have to get done tonight, and what I’m going to swim at practice tomorrow morning. And write that PyCon post…