I’m writing this on my way back home from nationals. It’s a meet that I am kind of glad to be finished with. Now, I get to try and reset and see if I can swim a little faster in a couple of weeks. With that goal in mind, I went for a little run yesterday after I was finished with the 200 IM. Then, in the evening, I went back and swam a little workout with some kick and aerobic. It was mostly to help me get ready for Japan, but I think that it was also a little bit of self-punishment for swimming slow.

After finals, most of my teammates had gone home so the three of us who were left got dropped off in the middle of the city to find a place to have dinner. The basis of our choice was whether the restaurant had a good dessert menu. We definitely picked a winner because we all got this “pick 3” thingy where you got to pick three desserts and it was totally awesome. Afterwards we didn’t have a ride back to the hotel but we wanted to work off a little of our dessert. So we started walking in the direction of the hotel. Fortunately, this time we had much better directions than Nat and I had in Monaco, so it only took a little over half an hour. It was slightly less pleasant though, because it was raining. Whatever, it’s not like we don’t spend most of our lives wet.

This morning, I helped with USA Swimming’s breaststroke camp. It was fun and really great to hear what some of the coaches and swimmers thought about breaststroke. The funny thing was that I was there as a coach and when I got there, I found out that Rebecca Soni, Jessica Hardy, Megan Jendrick, and Caitlin Leverenz were among the athletes. Awkward. Fortunately, I had most of the younger athletes in my group and I think that made for a good dynamic. I mean, I know a lot about breaststroke but I would hesitate to ask those guys to do anything different since, depending on the day, they can be just as good or better than me.

Anyway, I had fun working with my group. It took a little while for them to warm up to me but a few of them asked me to work with them for a few extra minutes afterwards. It was really rewarding to just give them a few concepts to think about and see them get better right in front of me.

It is a little weird though because sometimes I think that I might be teaching some girl the one thing that is going to put her over the edge to beat me at trials. But I think that I am confident enough in myself to look beyond that. It’s not like I am going to be around forever. This way, at least some of the things I worked so hard to learn can be.

P.S. I just sat on the runway in Denver for two hours. I think the only way my travel luck could get worse is if my plane crashed.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under tarakirk. 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.