Last night I ran into some swimming friends of mine and so today I decided to upload a plethora of old swim meet photos to flickr. Here is one of me in early 2003 winning my heat in the 50 meter freestyle. (Back then I didn’t swim in the fastest heat).
A couple of weeks ago the University of Letbridge was lucky enough to be able to host the Canada West Swim Meet for the 2004 / 2005 season. Personally I swam a best time in the 50 Breast but didn’t reach my goal of getting a National qualifying time in 50 free (I was about 1 second too slow). Anyway the University’s photographer got some great images which can be seen here.
The Lethbridge Herald did a story about our team and our performance in Winnipeg last weekend. Check out a scanned copy of the swimming article.
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.
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.
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.
This weekend at the meet in Medicine Hat I swam a 1:21 200m Free, a 25.01 50m Free and I did my 100m Free in 57.6 (or so). So three personal best times and a pretty good weekend. I also saw the movie “Brother Bear”. It’s a good Disney movie – so if you like Disney movies then I recommend it.
