Winter Wonderland Meet 2013

I'm post-call today, so I'll probably be actually finishing this blog post after today. This is mainly a "for my own records" type of post anyway, so most people are not going to be interested in reading this.

Natalie had a swim meet this past weekend, called the Winter Wonderland Meet, at her home natatorium. She swam in nine events over three days. Unfortunately, she got her period this past week and she felt crampy during most of her races, even after being medicated with ibuprofen. Cramps and swimming don't go together, so she ended up adding time to her personal bests in almost all of her events. That meant lots of tears of disappointment. 

She was disqualified in the 50 yard backstroke a month ago, and that was the only event this weekend where she actually took time off of her personal best. She was still disappointed, however, because her time for that was 34.34 seconds, and when she was disqualified, she said that her time had been 33-something seconds.

Below is a summary of her events and how she did in each of them:

Friday
200 IM--Seed Time 2:53.76, Time Swam 2:59.99, Change + 6.23
50 Free--Seed Time 31.17, Time Swam 31.46, Change +0.29
Saturday
200 Free--Seed Time 2:37.26, Time Swam 2:39.75, Change +2.49
50 Back--Seed Time 35.34, Time Swam 34.34, Change -1.00
100 Fly--Seed Time 1:23.94, Time Swam 1:28.32, Change +4.38
100 IM--Seed Time 1:21.53, Time Swam 1:21.64, Change +0.11
Sunday
100 Free--Seed Time 1:09.43, Time Swam 1:10.96, Change +1.53
50 Fly--Seed Time 33.86, Time Swam 35.65, Change +1.79
100 Back--Seed Time 1:15.70, Time Swam 1:16.71, Change +1.01

Patrick and I feel like they also haven't been working on their endurance in practice the last few months, so Natalie got noticeably tired especially in the longer races. Hopefully this will change in the next month or so as their workouts get harder.

On the plus side, Natalie sat near her friends Aspen and Ally, so they cheered her up when she felt down. Ally was doing really well at this meet and apparently Aspen was not. When we were leaving the meet on Saturday, I bought Natalie a small panda stuffed toy that was the smaller version of the one she got from Aspen from her birthday. I also bought her a small turtle that she could hand on her swim bag. She got a similar one, a dog, to give to Aspen to cheer her up. That's what friends are for.

I told Natalie on Saturday to hug the panda on Sunday when she's sad, because I was going to be on call on Sunday and not be able to be there to give her a hug. Yes, I was using retail therapy to cheer her up, but she's my daughter after all--she agreed that retail therapy does help!