First Meet

Well, it's over. My first meet was yesterday. It was a both a mess and a good experience. The heat sheets were given to us the night before, but when we got to the meet the next morning, we were told that they were incorrect. Supposedly "correct" ones were passed out, which also turned out to be incorrect. Heats were often combined without any notice, and more than few swimmers missed their events. The loudspeaker system was also very poor, so it was hard to hear what was going on. In fact, I missed my heat of the 100m ***, along with everyone else in my heat! Anyway, I was only scheduled for 2 events, so that was sort of disappointing. Luckily, I got onto a relay team for the 200 free. My first race of my first meet went poorly. My start was bad, my pullout was bad, my stroke was a mess, and my turn--which I have done perfectly hundreds of times in practice--was horrible. I still got second place (out of not many people) in my age group, but I swam it so much slower than I could have and have been. I think the problem started with the fact that I need to be focused before I try to swim fast, and I found out that I was supposed to be on the block about 30 seconds before my event started. I was really nervous anyway, but that just made it worse. I realized my mistakes as I was making them, but once I started off poorly, I couldn't seem to correct anything. The relay was really fun, though. We came in first place in our heat, but I don't even know the overall results. It was a 4x50 free, and I swam my leg 7 seconds faster than I have done at practice. That was a great event because I found out why everyone loves relays, and I also discovered that I am much more comfortable swimming freestyle than I thought I was. I'm going to a meet in a month, and I'm definitely going to swim more freestyle events.