I had a excellent workout this morning with a club 250 miles away. In the locker room, people were talking about summer nationals. One guy who was in my lane and seemed around my age talked about being in great shape for short course Nationals 2009 and mentioned his time in a distance event. Funny, it was the same time I did in that event at that meet.
I didn't say anything, thanked everyone for the workout and camaraderie and left.
Getting home tonight, I looked up the results for that meet. Yep. A guy from that club, in my age group was in that event, the 1000. We finished .6 apart.
I like to think I would have taken that opportunity to try to make a personal connection, such as, "Hey, my team hosted that Nationals. I sure hope you enjoyed your visit to the Fresno Metropolitan Area!" or even, "Oh, I swam that event too. I'm _________."
Ditto!
We have a quite a few visitors and our swimmers and Coaches enjoy hearing about those that may only be with us a short amount of time. Making some sort of personal connection means they will want to comeback so if our coaches aren't making the effort to learn more about them, our swimmers do.
Swimming is such a small world and hearing about the swimming background and different stories of how one comes into Masters Swimming adds to the fun.
In the locker room, people were talking about summer nationals. One guy who was in my lane and seemed around my age talked about being in great shape for short course Nationals 2009 and mentioned his time in a distance event. Funny, it was the same time I did in that event at that meet.
I workout with other teams reasonably frequently and when this comes up what I do, the only thing you can do really, is to immediately challenge them to a game of tetherball. Loser is never allowed to swim again for any reason.
I'm an excellent tetherballer.
