A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
Here are my new times from the weekend in Winnipeg:
Yesterday at 6:00am a chartered bus left the University of Lethbridge and took the Swim Team to the airport in Calgary. By 2:30 we had arrived in Winnipeg and were in the pool warming up. I got two best times yesterday, one in the 50 Fly and another in the 50 Breast. I placed 14th in Fly and 7th in Breast.
Today I swam the 200 Free and got another best time. I placed 14th. I also swam the 50 Free and got 8th going into the semi-finals. After the finals I moved up one rank to 7th for the finals tomorrow. In the semi-finals I went my second fastest 50 Free time (24.80).
I’m having a great time here. My team has been having such great swims — there are a lot of us swimming personal bests.
Anyway for now I’m just chilling out in the hotel using their free high speed internet connection while watching The Princess Bride on TV. I think in the future all hotels should have free wireless.
My roommate is swimming in the Nationals in Calgary this weekend. He is swimming against some big names like Rick Say and Matt Rose. He swam a personal best time this morning, placing 4th and going 23.03s in the 50 Free preliminaries. I haven’t heard how the finals went, but I’m definitely excited for him.
Update: The results are in, Richard went 23.36s in the finals taking 8th place in 50 Free at the Nationals. He swims again tomorrow and Sunday.
Swimming is great, I feel tired a lot but my body is getting into great shape. I am really aiming for CI’s this year and Andy thinks I have a pretty good shot. It will be excellent to compete against Canada’s best. Probably about a third of our Olympic team will be there.
Tonight I’m off to Medicine Hat for my friends’ wedding reception. Tomorrow I’m going to swim with AMAC (Medicine Hat’s Winter Club). They are having a little time trial meet which I’m hoping will boast my confidence towards achieving a CI qualifying time. After that, I’m going to spend the rest of the long weekend with my family. For those of you not from Canada reading this, this weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving. Being as busy as I am, I must say I’m so thankful for long weekends.
I read an article by Matt Haughey on possible ways of using BitTorrent to broadcast the Olympics.
It made me wonder if I will be able to find swimming torrents. So far my google searches have turned up nothing but I’m hoping that either something new will show up on Suprnova.org once the Olympics start, or perhaps someone reading this will be able to point me in the right direction.
The Milner cousins and I went kayaking down the Belly River again this weekend. The water has settled at a bearable temperature and the weather couldn’t have cooperated with us better today.
As we were floating down the river we saw a gaggle of 5 teenage girls gathered around the river bank, but all looking at something and all of them oblivious to our presence. Corry said, “Hi.” And they all jumped individually as they spun around and saw us drifting by. We chatted with them for a minute. The girls were visiting their grandparents for the holiday weekend. It turns out they were inspecting a cow’s skull they had found in the mud.
When I got back to my jeep I discovered bird droppings inside my car. How improbable is that? I’m guessing that when I left the door open to get my gear together that a bird let one fall at such an angle to precisely miss my seat and hit the arm rest. If they could only bomb that accurately in Iraq…
The video Aaron took of me last time is online. The water was higher today, but the video gives you a pretty good idea of what it was like today.
Jeff Kayaking Belly River June 2004 (3mb QT Mov)
The picture below was not from today, but it was taken on the same river I was kayaking down today.
The water was cold, ice cold. The kind of cold that hurts your hands when you put them even near the ice cold iciness that is the Belly River. It makes sense that the water is chilly because it’s coming directly from the melting snow up in the Rocky Mountains about a half hour drive from where we put in.
The water level wasn’t as high as it could have been, but there were still plenty of good features. On about the third really big hole I got stuck for a moment while the water thrashed me about like a rag doll. The water is tricky like that, it pulled me in gently then whipped me around quickly wrapping my head on the large rocks below. This is the first time I’ve ever had my helmet save me from serious head injury but, oh my, I certainly felt happy to have it. I came away with a small headache. The helmet came away with its shiny yellow finish marred in several places with large white scratches.
The incident wasn’t actually that much of an incident and we had a great time the rest of the afternoon. We just cruised down that cold, cold river, playing in the waves, and having a blast. My cousin made some short movie clips of us on his digital camera. I’ll post them when I get them.
I made a screen saver advertisement for the Swim Meet coming up on the weekend. Here it is in all its shockwave flash glory — in other words you don’t have to save it and install it in order to view it. I may only leave it up for a month or two, so if you missed it… well that’s too bad! :)
It was a fast meet. There were a lot of “meet” and “team” records set; one girl even set a world record! Two more of the swimmers on my team are going to CI’s. Too bad I’m not one of them.
I set a new personal best in 50 fly putting me in 27th place squeaking in just under the 30 second mark with a time of 29.89. My 50 free wasn’t as good as I would have liked it to be, but I did place 16th with a time of 25.97. Oh and not to forget my DFL in 100 Free with a time of 58.56.
I’m off to Victoria for the Canada West swim meet. I’ll be back Monday for regular blogging updates.