I am sitting on the plane on my way to Melbourne, Australia, for the 2007 FINA World Championships! I feel a great sense of relief, and yet I also feel excitement beginning to build. It has been an incredible week leading up to this moment.For those of you who don’t know me, I am Kara Lynn Joyce. I am a senior at the University of Georgia and have just completed the final meet of my college career, the 2007 NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships. I ended the meet by winning the 50- and 100-yard freestyles for the fourth consecutive year.

I had a great time swimming for my school. Those four years go by fast! I don’t think it is all sinking in yet that my college career is over. My plan is to continue to train with my Georgia team through the next few Olympics, so not much has really changed.

Now I’m on to the next phase. I am really looking forward to this meet. It is the last major international competition before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, so it’s a great benchmark to see where I am at and where the rest of the world is at.

The night after my meet finished was an absolute whirlwind! There were so many things I had to do! I hired an agent (her name is Amy — she is really great, but more about her later), met with potential sponsors (I can’t talk about that yet, but I promise there will be some big news soon), attended a team dinner where I said good-bye to family and friends that came to Minnesota to watch my meet, and then flew home to Georgia where I had a day and a half to pack up my life for a month on the road. Somehow, I managed to get everything together in a short amount of time, including a trip to Best Buy for an international power converter, an adapter for the plane so I can use my computer and a new iPod. My old one has a short battery life, and I could not imagine a trip this long without music. Needless to say, I am seriously sleep deprived!

The longest I’ve ever been on a plane is 11 hours, so this flight from L.A. to Australia, at 17 hours, is definitely going to be a new personal record. I am one of maybe three lucky people on the plane that has an entire row of seats to myself, and I am going to take advantage of this right now. I am putting on my headphones, and I am going to stretch out on these seats and try to catch up on some serious sleep. It doesn’t sound like the most comfortable option, but if you are me right now, it doesn’t matter.

OK, that’s it for now. More from Melbourne later!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 4:58 pm and is filed under karalynnjoyce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.