Can I have a badge now?

I survived! I ended up swimming about 4 hours all told, not including the relay race we did for the last hour. My team won, despite being half dead. Well, I guess that didn't really matter since we were all dead so it was equal! I was just going to swim it normally, but we had the swim coach on our team, so he pushed us super hard to beat the team next to us, and ended up beating the other team as well!

It was a little wierd, as we were allowed to break all the pool rules! We brought the couch from our managers office onto the deck, and built a system of nests for sleeping. Daren didn't sleep overnight, so he crashed really hard in the morning. He slept though pretty much everything for a bit. Including Jason poking his face. They're brothers, so I think he was used to it.


Over all the whole thing went pretty well, though I swam super slow. Next year I'll try to swim harder. We were all full of injuries anyway. I got a friction rash on my underarm from my bathing suit after the forth half hour swim. I had to bandage it to keep swimming. We joked that it looked like I was in a gang. The other arm got it when we were doing the relay, but I didn't have time to stop and bandage it, so I just slapped a load of Vaseline on it every little while to keep it from getting more irritated. Jason and Daren both messed up their knees from doing too much breast stroke and all of our arms ache. Even Fabian, our swim team coach is sore, and he's a machine.

I have to say we learned a lot from the first time. Next time will be better. And yes, I will totally do this again. The thing that I didn't think we would need was the Vaseline, we all used it, and I should have used more. It stops your skin from drying out and helps with irritation. We were totally helped by the insane amounts of food brought by Dale, who is a mom of a bunch of kids in our swimming program. We call her David's Mom, though I finally learned her name last night! She is a caterer, so she would show up every couple of hours with trays of food she had made for us. I know we would have died with out it. Bananas were also essential. There was a crisis at about 11:30pm when Fabian realized that we were out of bananas, he had to run out to a 24 hour grocery store to get more.

While I managed to rescue my hair for the most part by showering (shampoo and conditioner) after almost every swim I did, I went and got my hair cut today.


It's super short! I loves it. It's the shortest I've ever had it done. I have a policy against getting my hair cut in the middle of a swim session, I always wait until the few weeks we have off in between. However, because of this swim insanity, I had to wait an extra week, which was driving me crazy! It'll be perfect for teaching though, since it's so short it won't get anywhere near the water!