We had our longest swim meet day ever! The format of this swim meet included preliminary races AND finals. That meant that if you were in the top 18 (two heats of 8 swimmers plus two alternates), you came back in the evening to swim the finals. The only other experience I can compare this too was with watching the Olympics. The swimmers then would swim in preliminary heats and then they would come back and swim the finals for medals. So, we had mixed feelings about this. Natalie doing well meant that we had to stay longer.
This picture is Natalie's first relay team while swimming for AAAA. She was put in the 200 yard freestyle relay. It's always a great experience to swim a relay, and Natalie makes friends so easily that as soon as she met these girls she was chatting away with them. They won first place amongst the four relay teams for girls 10 and under. They were supposed to be the "B" team because their times going into this meet were slower than the "A" team. Well, they beat the "A" team by 0.14 seconds (2:08.70).
Natalie swam in two individual events today, the 50 yard freestyle and the 100 yard butterfly. She about equaled her previous best 50 yard freestyle time (33.14) with a time of 33.15 sec. That was good enough to 9th place but because someone dropped out of the finals, she got to move up to the 8th spot in the finals, meaning she got to swim in the fastest heat. She got 7th place in the Girls' 10 and under 50 yard freestyle with a time of 33.30. She was disappointed that she added time to her personal best, but that's all part of the learning process.
The exciting part of the day was when she swam in the preliminary heats for the Girls' 10 and under 100 yard Butterfly. She shattered her previous time of 1:33.48 by swimming 8.5 seconds faster with a time of 1:24.98! She was so happy that she was crying when I saw her. I've never seen her cry from being happy before, so I was a bit tentative. I had to ask her if she was crying because she was happy, just to make sure. That time gives her an "A" time (up from "BB") so she can swim that event in the upcoming A Championships next month. She was a little disappointed that she got third place in the finals with a little time added back on (1:25.31), but once again, she is much harder on herself that we can ever be.
So, that meant two events that occurred very early in the day. Patrick missed both because he was taking Anthony to school for a soccer tournament, taking Alex to spend the night over at a friend's house, and then taking Eric to his basketball game. We could have left at that time (just after 10 am), but we had to wait to swim the relay, which was one of the last three events and didn't occur until after 12:30. The afternoon warmups were at 4pm with the finals starting at 5pm. We ended up just staying there because we wouldn't have had more than two hours at home with the 30-minute plus drive one way.
Thank goodness they had free Wifi there! Patrick dropped Eric off so he could go to Anthony's two games (at 11am and 3pm). Eric was on the iPad pretty much the whole time, either playing Angry Birds Rio or watching an animated show called Dino Squad. Natalie played with her Kindle Fire and one of the iPads. This long day really wore all of us out, especially all that waiting in between events. We'll be back again tomorrow.
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