Dave's Thoughts of the Day: October 18th

Here we go!  I have my swim meet on Sunday morning.  REALLY excited about it. 

I'm a little disappointed at the turnout though.  Only 12 people registered from our swim club.  We've had year where as many as 25 or 30 people were in our home meet.  Seems like a period of transition... new people in the club, new coaches, all that jazz.  I hope there's a rally and we get around 20 by this time tomorrow.  For those who are in the meet though, good luck to you all!   I can't wait.

Imagine, for a moment, if they decided to take parking tickets and give them to you by email?   So you'd go to your car, say it was parked illegally, and you'd see no paper ticket there.  You'd go "do the dance!  I'm in the clear."  Then you go home home and check GMail and see an email citation.

That would *suck!*  That false sense of relief for 30 minutes?  Oy vey.

Diddy Riese last night.   The line was really short too... didn't take that long to get to the counter.  I ordered the ice cream sandwich with an oatmeal raisin cookie on one side and a choco chip cookie on the other.   The ice cream flavor I chose was strawberry.  All three of those things really went well together -- an excellent choice.

There is one awkward element of swim meets that everyone has to go through, and it's putting on the racing suit.   When you swim you get a suit that fits your regular waistline size... so if you're a pants size 32 you get a size 32 suit, etc.  but for meets you size that two sizes DOWN.  Hahaha, and man, some of us, when we try that, it gets comical.   I mean it's like the threads on the thing are clinging for dear life.

Then there's the factor of special technical suits which are already sized down inherently for these events... fastskin and aquablade swimwear... that's a tough one to call... do you size just one down or two down or not at all?  They say that even with these, you try to size down at least one... even two.

Basically the adage is:  get the tightest suit possible that still fits.   Women carry themselves fantastically with these extra tight suits... but us guys?  Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh baby.

I feel like personally I've been ok with mine... I sized two down from normal for an aquablade suit.   It's gotten me some incredible results too -- just wish it didn't have the muffin effect so much.  I've been getting in shape though!  Maybe it won't be as bad this time.

Anyone ever go for a night of drinking right before a big game or athletic event?  Man don't do that!  That is suicide...   save it for after your event as Olympians do.

I'm very excited about the swim program I have for the meet... four events: 100 fly, 50 free, 50 fly, 100 free.  The last two are actually scheduled as back to back events so I'll have a very tight window to warm up/down between them.  It's all right though, as the 1-free is just an experiment.  What I really want to do is break my record of 2:20 for 1-fly and 58 seconds for 50-fly.   I think I'm already swimming faster than this at PRACTICE speed so I got my fingers crossed.  It's been a year since my last meet and I'm still relatively new to swimming.   Here we go!

I think that's all I have this time out.  Enjoy your weekend everyone!