City Meet

So, as some of you know, last weekend the swim team had their City Meet. Since this is my first year on the team, I had never been to one before, and overall it was a great experience. I swam the 100 yard breaststroke, and I dropped 7 seconds from my last time! This new time, 1 min. and 26.4 seconds, put me as the top 16th 100 yard breaststroke swimmer in all of Baton Rouge! I was thrilled that I was going to get to swim in the Championships the next day, but I was even more excited about coming so close to my year's goal (which, when I set it, I didn't realize how insane it was, because I had to drop like thirty seconds from my original time). My goal was to qualify for the State Meet, and in order to do that I would have to swim the 100 yards of breaststroke in 1 min. and 25.96 seconds, which is only .44 seconds faster than my previous time. So, on the day of the Championships, I swam my hardest and I realized that the less than 1/2 a second was not going to be easy to lose, especially being sore from the meet the day before. I did not qualify, but I did learn some valuable lessons. (Sorry if this seems like a mom lecturing you about good things coming from not-so-great events, but it is true.) Anyway, I learned that not succeeding makes the times that you do succeed so much better. With a little more training, I am sure that I will qualify next year, and I think that I will appreciate that success much more, having not achieved that goal so easily.