Tag Archives: swimming

I’m Registered for the 2012 Penticton BC Long Distance Triathlon

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Assuming I’m alive and well, I will wade into Lake Okanagon around 6:45 a.m. on August 26th, 2012.

It’s only taken me about fifteen years to commit to going crazy long—2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile “run”. My brother, who calls it Ironman Canada, did it when he was in his early 40s. Me at 50, figure that’s a fair fight.

Why now when I haven’t been racing at any distance? A perfect storm of cognitive slippage, turning 50, watching my friends race all summer, getting stronger on the bike, and reflecting on the GalPal’s health struggles.

I’m more anxious than excited because it’s the most I’ve ever asked of my bod. The training is going to require unprecedented self-discipline and I’m going to suffer big time on race day. I’ve already lost some sleep with jarring images of the swim start and “running” for four hours plus in 90 degree weather after 112 miles in the saddle.

If it’s 90+ degrees on the run like it was this year, my brother’s family record of 11:45 is probably safe. I know he’ll be rooting for me. . . to blow up early in the run.

Can’t wait to embrace the triathlon subculture I’m so enamored with. I love the World Triathlon Corporation’s single-minded bidness focus so I’ve decided to rent myself out to the highest bidder. That’s right, I’m officially for sale. NASCAR has nothing on me. I’ve already been contacted by representatives from AAPL, Coca-Cola, and Tide. I’ll wear their logos, or if the price is right, have them permanently tattooed on the body part of their choice.

I’m going to use that revenue flow to hire a coach who I will pay more than two-thirds of the world’s people earn. Also, don’t tell the GalPal, but I’ll be tapping our retirement accounts to buy lots of very expensive bike equipment, shaving grams as I go. Hyperbaric chambers aren’t cheap either.

And rest assured, I’ll embrace the narcissism that often seems endemic to the sport. That means I’ll be posting pillions of pictures of myself getting fitter and fitter and blogging about all of my training details until every last reader’s eyes glaze over. And even though my brother looked roided up in 2002, I’ve decided to race clean, again in an effort to level the playing field.

Just kidding. My primary goal is to put in the necessary work without letting it take over my life. More easily written than done I suppose. Appropriately starting on April 1, just under five months of prep. Eight week build, followed by eleven weeks of high volume, and a ten day taper.

Ron Byrnes has agreed to coach me. And with the goal of not letting it take over my life, I don’t intend on blogging much about my prep. If all goes well, I will toe the line in the best shape of my life and then race smartly, meaning steadily.

Can I put in the work without breaking down or losing balance, survive the swim start, avoid tacks on Maclean Creek, run slowly all afternoon instead of walking, go sub 11:45, and get home without cramping up uncontrollably and driving off the road?

Stay tuned sports fans.

2011 Black Diamond Half Iron Race Report

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With apologies to Lorne, swim-bike-run posts today and Friday. We return to regular programming Monday, October 3rd.

Like Brett Farvah, came out of retirement to compete in the Black Diamond Half Iron last Saturday. The weather was ideal, calm, partially sunny, 60’s-lower 70’s.

Only my second half iron—1.2 mile swim/56 mile bike/13.1 mile run. Finished in 5:13+ in 2006 after cycling too hard for my fitness and unraveling on the run. Took me five years to recover.

The deets—30:42 swim, 3:12 T1, 2:42:54 bike, 1:52 T2, 1:40:09 run, 4:58:49. One of the athletic accomplishments I’m most proud of along with extricating myself from the top of my roof after getting spread eagled putting on Christmas lights and scoring five goals in a sophomore water polo game against Western High in Cypress, CA back in the typewriter era.

Chillin' pre-race

Heaven help me if Chip Schooler ever sees this playlist!

Went in with modest swim volume and three short runs off the bike. Hadn’t ran 13.1 in ages either. On the other hand, my cycling was really solid all summer, I’ve strengthened my core, and I’ve been churning out 30 mile running weeks. Despite being fit, I was nervous about going out too fast and then unraveling again. So the plan was to stay within myself, cruise/bilateral breathe throughout the swim, keep the cadence high on the bike, and run conservatively from start to finish.

The fog just waiting for the start gun

Fog rolled in right as we were starting the swim. It was a two loop .6 mile diamond shaped course so the buoys were closer together than normal, but the fog got so thick it was hard to see them. I was sighting off the arms of a guy in front of me in a sleeveless wetsuit. Felt like I zigged and zagged a bit inside and outside the buoy-line which gives me a sponsorship idea.

The other problem with the swim was I couldn’t dial it back after going hard for the first 150 yards to get into some open water. I didn’t bilateral breathe once and swam harder than I had intended. Theme of the day. Decent time/start.

The bike course was nice, wide shoulders, smooth pavement, rolling. Just over 2k’ in elevation. And it was the cleanest race I’ve ever seen. A couple out and backs, two loop course so lots of opportunities to see others, and not one instance of drafting. With my road bike, pseudo-aero bars, and non-race wheels, I was outgunned in the hardware department, but I put up an admirable fight. I also road differently, like the roadie I am, standing on the climbs, coasting in a crouch on the descents, only aero maybe half of the time. Everyone else seemed like they were aero all the time, always seated, pedaling downhill, perfect spike-free wattage charts no doubt. My wattage chart would probably resemble that of a major earthquake.

Late in the ride, going pretty hard at over 20mph, I felt a wee bit of lactic acid forming. Internal dialogue. “How are you planning to run after this?” Again, couldn’t get out of my mod-hard groove. “We’ll, we’ll know whether we rode too hard by the two mile mark of the run.”

The run was on rural roads with a couple of out and backs, one ran twice. I liked it because again you could see where you were relative to the other competitors. Right out of T2, I exited stage left into a PortaPit. I’ve watched televised college football games that took less time than that whiz.

Once I started running in earnest, a 25 year old passed me like I was standing still. I figured that was a good sign that I hadn’t started too fast. Shortly afterwards, he cramped up and stopped. Eventually he recovered and later passed me, ultimately finishing about a minute ahead of me. Youthful exuberance, terrible pacing. Only dude to pass me during the run (because the burners outcycled me)*. I was cruising, thinking I was running my planned 8:00/minute miles, but my splits were crazy fast–7/7:20ish. What the hell? I had my legs and the turnover was there. I began picking off people, looking past the person in front of me to the one in front of them and then pulling them back. Only once got out of my comfort zone when I didn’t realize the road had kicked up a few degrees.

I was cruising so comfortably I was pre-writing this blog post in my head, not racing per se, just running within myself, not chasing people, just watching them come back to me. Then everything changed at mile 8. I decided my 7:20’s were suicidal and decided to sit on a guy I ran up on until mile 10. “Use him to slow down,” I told myself. Just about then, my hammies seized up as they often do when I ask too much from them. Did the straight legged walk a bit, managed to work it out enough to slowly jog to the aid station, downed some electrolyte drink, and then eased back into running. Too strong of a performance to succumb to walking. Now 43 (his age as noted on his right calf) was at least 100 meters up on me. Both hammies were on the edge, but I tentatively pressed on.

Between mile posts 10 and 11, I came back up on 43 and now 46 who he was sitting on. Pass or rest for the final two miles? I decided not to adjust my pace and made the pass. 43 said something like “Didn’t know if you were cramped up for good” and I assured both of them I was on the edge and my hammies could go at any minute especially on the downhills. Didn’t know if one or both would come with me, but neither was able to. Finished steadily over the last mile of trail around the lake. I was pleasantly surprised by my run and the day more generally.

Walked straight to the beach, stripped down to the bike shorts, and disappeared into the cold lake. Nothing speeds recovery like that. Well, besides a Big Tom’s chocolate shake.

* Except for John Brewer (47) of Kirkland. Check out his splits for a chuckle. I went to the race director to get a print out of the results so the mean lady guarding the age group awards would give me mine. Tangent—if I had known it was another very hokey (made in China) medal with nothing imprinted on it and not the cool clear/plexiglass engraved plaques for the winners, I wouldn’t have bothered. Anyways, I watched the Race Director spend fifteen minutes trying to explain to JB that he cut the course. He was incredulous. The Race Director drew a detailed map of the course and went over it and over it. Then afterwards his friend said “Yeah, I should have seen you here (pointing to an out and back on the hand drawn map) and I never did.” I would have been more direct than the Race Director. “You were 102nd in the swim, 78th in the bike, but somehow rallied to run the fifth fastest run split of the day?! Any relation to Rosie Ruiz?!”

What Does Olympia Bear Girls Swimming Foretell About the Future?

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The hard working, talented, quirky goofballs suggest the future is brighter than all the doomsdayers would lead you to believe.

We just completed our first five extra-long practices. Everyone put in the necessary work and got along well. Coach is seemingly trying to disprove my thesis from awhile back–that people don’t change. He’s more flexible than before, letting his hair down and deferring to the captains and his assistant coaches. Relaxing.

Because they applied themselves, the girls improved their technique and began to get in shape. Lots of impressive new ninth graders. I ran stairs with the team in four groups, the ninth graders, the sophs, the juniors, and the seniors. I told the ninths that I didn’t know what to call them. They didn’t really appear to be freshmen. Freshwomen might be a tad racy. The politically correct term on college campuses is “first years”. Then a brilliant suggestion, “Fresh”. Some of the Fresh are going to make life miserable for their elder teammates. In total, three girls had the audacity to run the stairs faster than me. I told them they may have to switch to x-country.

I told the team that Coach just celebrated his 47th wedding anniversary and was planning on swimming 1.75 miles in Lake Washington over the weekend. I pointed out that’s the amazing thing about swimming, you can do it a heck of a lot longer than football, soccer, probably any other sport. During this preseason, the girls are unplugged for four hours every morning, running stairs, talking, stretching, talking, planking, talking, practicing, talking, racing, talking.

At one point, Sixteen yelled over during a kick set, “Hey dad, tell me to ‘Pick it up!'” “Okay, ‘Byrnes, pick it up!'” She then hoisted her posterior 8 inches higher above the water. All of her lanemates laughed uncontrollably. Fool me once.

I ask one senior where she wants to go to school and she says Stanford. Backup, USC. Unacceptable I tell her. A Chinese-American fresh jumps out to stretch a sore shoulder and says “It’s probably violin practice.” I’m guessing there’s a Tiger Mother behind that tiger.

My hope is the coaches and parents can focus broadly on the process this season instead of narrowly on district and state time cuts. In the broad scope of things, high school is over in a flash. The most important questions aren’t how fast did you swim or how many points did you score, but did you learn to work hard, did you swim to the best of your abilities, did you gain confidence in your physical strength, did you get along with others, did you enjoy it enough that you want to continue doing it well into the future?

19

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Another birthday. And so two characters exit the stage, Fifteen and Eighteen, and two enter, Sixteen and Nineteen.

I’m at a stage in life, most likely late-middle, where I don’t take mine or other close friends’ or family members’ birthdays for granted. Increasingly I think of birthdays as celebrations of another year of life together.

After writing warm fuzzy posts about the GalPal and youngest daught, there’s real pressure to deliver more warm fuzzies this time around.

I know I should write about how Nineteen is also blossoming on her own at college. About how helpful she’s been at home this summer. About how she salvaged a summer of unemployment by hustling together odd jobs in the hood and a half-time internship. About how nice it was that she invited me to go to Portland with her for a Sara Bareilles concert (that fact that her mom didn’t want her driving home alone after midnight might have factored in too).

Can’t though because a part of Nineteen’s blossoming is continuing to get faster in the pool. When she got faster than me at the 500 freestyle, I consoled myself by thinking at least I own the shorter stuff. Since that’s no longer true, I figured well I can still sing “Look at Me Now” to myself as I pull away in open water. Then Mel, her, and I dove into Ward Lake last Saturday afternoon. I used to be able to pick her out when looking back while breathing. Now I have to lift the chin and tilt the ol’ noggin forward.

So since this is what it has come to, her showing no respect for her elders, I’m going to tap that middle schooler in me that does the opposite of whatever I’m supposed to. Stopping right here sans warm fuzzies.

And as Sara sings. . . Who cares if you disagree? You are not me. Who made you king of anything?

Friday Fitness Notes

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Swimming. My freestyle has always been, shall we say, slipshod. My nieces have yelled hurtful things at me, Coach Smith has barked at me from the deck and gestured wildly. All to no avail. Then I watched this underwater freestyle pull video and something clicked. Thanks to Gary Hall Sr. I’ve been dropping time in my twice weekly naked (no pull buoy or paddles) 1,000 yard swims. Probably too late for London though. Typical April 2011 workout—1,000 free; 400 kick; 400 drill; 12×100 IM every third free (yikes, this week on a very leisurely 2:00), 500 free paddles/buoy.

Running. Those Boston times were obscene. I disagree with the experts on the inevitability of a sub 2:00 marathon. Dropping another 183 seconds is going to be excruciatingly difficult. I just don’t think the pace of improvement over the last decade is sustainable. I’m going to go so far as to say I will not live long enough to see a sub2. I’m running about 30 miles a week. Enjoying the morning light which means more trails. Here’s a picture of my “best listener” running partner after the “paw wipe-down” and in the middle of the morning chore.

The labradude earning his keep

Cycling. Three very fast training rides with the local team recently. Road strong and held on for the first two and got dropped early on the third this week. No excuse, just got caught sleeping and when the gap formed, I didn’t have enough snap to close it. The Costco potato chip/swiss cheese pre-ride snack probably didn’t help. Then I made the mistake of flipping through my April 2010 log and found out I’m not ahead of schedule, I’m behind. It’s looking like I’ll log somewhere around 400 miles this month. I suppose I could use the weather as an excuse, but I’m already forming a fair weather reputation. DG pulled up next to me shortly before I was dropped Tuesday night and chided, “Kinda iffy weather for you isn’t it?” The good news is I’m in RAMROD, as is Supplement, Lance, and DG. This is where I might write that it will no doubt be the summer highlight, that is, if my 25th wedding anniversary wasn’t this summer.

In related news, I watched Ironman NZ while cycling indoors earlier in the week. Make that Nutrigrain Ironman NZ. Forced advertising on swim caps and elsewhere. I know resistance is futile, but for me at least, it takes away from the whole event. As if the participants aren’t paying enough already. My family gets tired of me watching Ironman races on Universal Sports (greatest channel ever, even better than Oxygen) and Lance regularly rips me for not toeing the line. Maybe I’d swim 3,800 meters, then cycle 180 kilometers (the metric is just to ruffle Lance’s American sensibilities), and then run a marathon if I could find a low-key, non-descript, non-commercial race setting.

I know what you’re thinking. “What’s stopping you from swimming 3,800 meters in Ward Lake, cycling 180k all over Thurston and Lewis counties, and the running out to BHarbor and back?” When it comes to avoiding Ironman, I always have an answer. When I beat my brother’s and Lance’s studly Ironman Canada times, they’ll both say my time isn’t official.

Weekend Notes—December 18, 2010

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Miscellaneous notes unrelated to the blog’s laser focus on questioning education conventional wisdom.

• Saw a great documentary on Yao Ming five years ago. He’s very personable and likable. Since seeing that film I’ve followed him. It’s disappointing to learn he’s out for the season and that he’s probably played his last NBA game. China’s Bill Walton sans the scruffy beard, unrivaled college education, and Grateful Dead vibe.

• The GalPal turned 50 recently. Sometimes a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Fifteen’s gift tells you everything you need to know about what it’s like to live with a teenager.

• For me at least, swimming is very different from running and cycling in that I have to think about my form all the time. I get lazy and revert to muscle memory which means my elbows aren’t high enough, I cross over a bit, my stroke gets too short, and I don’t complete my stroke underwater. The challenge is trying to change these flaws simultaneously. The obvious answer is to work on one at a time, but sometimes when I try to add an additional correction in, the previous fix unravels. And the harder the set and the deeper in a workout, the worse my form. I’d probably be better off just doing slow drills for a month. Whatever I do, I swim nearly identical splits. Today’s 100’s were 1:25’s with toys (paddles/buoy).

• Just when I thought Lance was over the 2009 Black Hills Triathlon, he wants me to commit to racing the Boise Half Ironperson with him. He’s dastardly. It has a noon start. I’d begin the run around 3:3op in Boise in mid-June. I was born in Boise and I love symmetry. Maybe, like a Pacific Northwest salmon, I should return to and die in Boise? I’d rather do this race.

• The more minimalist in orientation I become, the less I like traditional Christmas gift giving. I know I should focus on the spirit of the giving and be more appreciative, it just seems most gifts don’t fill any real need and unnecessarily contribute to clutter. If you’re still wondering what to get me, massage gift certificates are $47 at the Briggs YMCA.

• It’s nice having Eighteen home from college. She had a great first trimester. Proud of her and just hoping and praying I can hang with her in the pool Monday.

• In the shocker of the week, I created a twitter account (@PressingPause) and as of today, I have one follower. Look out Linkedin and Facebook.

Thanks for reading. Have a nice weekend.

Competitive Fire

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You’re granted an “adolescent magic wand” with which you can provide the young adults you know an intense competitiveness or an above average ability to cooperate with others. Which do you choose?

Trick question because they’ll benefit from an intense competitiveness in the world of work and from cooperation-based experiences, knowledge, and skills in their personal lives.

An intense competitiveness will undoubtedly come in handy with the college admissions process, tightening labor markets, and the fluid, knowledge economy that an increasing number of Chinese, east-Indian, and Brazilian young adults are confidently entering.

Rewind to last week’s Narrows League Swim Meet at Foss High School in Tacoma, WA. Two hundred adolescent female swimmers exhibiting differing degrees of competitiveness. The mother and father in front of me sit passively until their daughter enters the water and then they go beserk. Their daughter, one of the top swimmers at the meet, seemingly feeds off their energy.

I’ve got the dad all figured out. Former national water polo player, then extreme fighter, and now UFC executive. He’s stolen my hair cut, but I let it go because I’m a wee bit intimidated by the tats running down his rippled triceps.

Event two for his daughter and I’m in full on eavesdropping mode. Dad is flexing for daughter and she’s eating it up from the behind the block. He air-shouts and she lip-reads, “GO HARD!” She eats it up as if there’s an electric current connecting them. Swims a 25 second 50 free and all I can think is the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

My approach to spectating is more cerebral. I’m in Phil Jackson-mode, sitting quietly focusing more on writing down splits than firing up my daughter. Afterwards, when I get real excited, I flash her a thumbs up sign. Forget electricity, I barely muster a spark.

It must be my fault that my daughters lack competitive fire. But just about then the competitive fire water got muddier.

I’m in the top row of bleachers, leaning against the cinder block wall next to the father of our team’s swimmer of the meet. She won the 50 free, beating rippled triceps daughter in the process, despite having only the fifth fastest qualifying time and she won the 100 breast going away (1:08). Her dad, who I know, stood passively next to me while she swam. Like me, he doesn’t have a bicep to flex. Two egghead peas in a pod, we talk philosophically. Wait a minute, where does his daughter’s intensity come from?

I ask if she’s going to swim in college. “No, we’re discouraging her from doing that it’s such a time-suck.” Mental parenting report card. Two points for separating their egos, minus one for not letting her decide herself.

Maybe competitive fire is like most things in life, part nature, part nurture. Most adolescents are wired like their parent(s) and follow their lead, but not all. What works for each family is different.

Returning to the magic wand, being comfortable with competition is important, but of course there’s a point of diminishing returns. We all know people whose competitive nature gets the best of them.

Once a young person gets into college, and once they take a job, cooperation-based experiences, knowledge, and skills are more integral to their success. Not just their workplace success, but their happiness in life more generally. Which begs the question, why aren’t we more intentional about teaching young people how to cooperate with one another?

One Size Fits None

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A warm welcome to DCRainmaker readers who are pouring in as a result of Ray linking to my recent “Where’s the Romance?” post. My most read post of all time, by a considerable margin, is one titled “School Mission Statements”. Do a Google search for “school mission statements” and it’s the fourth link, but whose counting? Ray gets 6,000 hits a day, a little more than me. If yesterday’s record uptick in readership continues for very long, “Where’s the Romance?” may give “School Mission Statements” a run for its money.

Now back to regular programming.

Read an interesting swimming article recently that detailed the different mindset of sprinters. Even elite Olympic caliber sprinters don’t like training and get bored extremely quickly. (Was that the rare double adverb? Is that legal? Shouldn’t I know that?) The ability to adapt to differences and individualize one’s coaching, teaching, campaigning, and sales pitches often distinguishes swim coaches, teachers, politicians, and salespeople as particularly excellent.

In teaching it’s referred to as curriculum differentiation. Curriculum differentiation occurs when a teacher adjusts his/her lesson plan so that it meets the needs of all students.

Amazingly, nearly all of the car salespeople I’ve interacted with seem to be reading from the same script. None of them have successfully read me. If they had, they’d bypass the small talk about what I do for a living and my family which I can’t stand and focus exclusively on the car’s features (which they often are unable to do very well).

The high school coach that I help and I sometimes get frustrated with some girls that don’t practice very hard. They sleep-swim, stop to adjust caps and goggles, stretch their shoulders, go to the bathroom during main sets, and in some cases miss practice altogether. But now that I think about it, they tend to be the sprinters. Their natural tendencies and our workouts are misaligned. They’ll probably never embrace the process, or the long, sometimes monotonous and always tiring rhythms of distance training.

If I’m ever a head coach, I think I’ll design three different workouts—a sprint one, a distance one, and a distance-lite one. The sprint workout, which will emphasize intensity and variety, will last about 60% as long as the others. Instead of coasting for ninety minutes, they’ll go real hard for 50 minutes.

Where’s the Romance?

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LOVE this guy’s blog; however, I shouldn’t profess my fondness for his blog that way because “You can’t love something,” moms says, “that can’t love you back.”

But as brilliant as Ray’s blog is, there’s something lacking. The same “something” lacking from online triathlon forums like this one—romance.

Not the candlelight hot under the collar type for which the word is normally associated, but the unbridled joy that sometimes accompanies moving outdoors in nature.

Ray, sports science companies, and other triathletes are turning triathlon into a science in which every workout is endlessly sliced, diced, and analyzed.

As a middle adaptor of the personal technology the tri-scientists obsess over, I’m not immune from their privileging fitness science over the aesthetics, art, and romance of swimming, running, and cycling. Consequently, when I run there’s a gadget in my running shorts pocket that bounces signals off satellites so I know precisely how far and fast I’ve run. When I cycle, I lean on my bicycle computer to determine what kind of ride it was based upon whether I achieved a higher than normal average speed.

But there’s no computer that can capture the beauty of a late summer lake swim when the water is glassy and the perfect temperature. No reason to try to measure the rhythm of a long, smooth stroke. No counting of strokes and no measuring of heart rate required.

Nor is there any gadget on the market that can capture what it’s like to run at dawn on golden leaf carpeted Northwest trails in October in a foggy/low light mix. Why even try to quantify how alive I felt last Thursday on my pre-dawn solo eight-miler around Capital Lake. The Capital Dome was lit up and the lake surface was bespeckled with reflections of the Deschutes streetlights. Spectacular.

How do you measure what it’s like to run under the lighting of a full moon or cycle with a friend along the Sound on an unusually warm October afternoon? It’s these experiences with nature and good friends that make me feel alive, not my average watts. And it’s these experiences that clear my mind and strengthen me for day-to-day life.

I’m fortunate to have a great running posse, but lately, since I’m in marathon-mode, I’ve been getting in a few solo runs each week too which has been nice. During one last week, I spent a few of the miles replaying an argument the Galpal and I had stumbled into the previous evening. Reluctantly, I had to admit that the video replay in my head provided inconvertible evidence that I was mostly responsible for the dustup. So when I walked in the house, I apologized. The GalPal was so taken by my (rare) selfless gesture, she violated her strict “no sweaty” hug policy. All of which set me up for a candlelight hot under the collar type of evening. And that my friends is what’s known as the “running romance multiplier effect”.

Credit me when you use it.

6:53

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Bonus, Thursday-edition. Parent bragging alert.

6:53. Fifteen’s 500 free time Tuesday night. Awesome breakthrough swim, but she was disappointed because the league meet qualifying time is 6:51. Teammates keep qualifying and she wants to too. She’s dropped about 35 seconds in the last few weeks. Here’s what I said to her afterwards:

You can choose to focus on not making league or on a seventeen second personal record, but why let some league official determine whether it was a good swim or not?! It was an amazing swim, a breakthrough swim! I’m really proud of you. (Feint smile.) All you can do is give your best effort and let the qualifying take care of itself. You did give your best effort and I’m very proud of you. Even more importantly, you’re a great teammate, and a kind and caring person.

Then I committed the one unforgivable high school parenting faux pas. I hugged her and kissed her wet head. . . in public. You think I’d have learned by now.

I love swimming because it’s so damn meritocratic. Fifteen started getting after it in practice about three-four weeks ago. Leading out her lane, swimming with purpose, and lo and behold, the times started falling. Some more experienced talented teammates aren’t working that hard in practice and they’re fading over the second half of races and losing to harder workers.

Granted not all kids have equal opportunities to swim, but once in the water, there’s an awfully strong correlation between training consistency and intensity and performances in meets.

Fifteen has two more chances, today, and next week, to qualify. And before my brother chimes in with “How does it feel to be the third fastest in your family of four?” The cushion is shrinking, but I could still take her.

Evening, post-meet update—6:48.