Year-round

It's Saturday morning and I am sitting in the stands at the Fairland Aquatic Center, venue for the PVS October Open swim meet. This is a weekend long meet but the 13-18 sessions are first thing in the morning so I am here bright and early, waiting for the Boys 13-18 Breaststroke to begin. The estimated timeline had that event likely to begin at 9:06, an oddly exact prediction. It's 8:42 now so we'll see what happens. 

This is my son's first and last year as a year-round club swimmer. His summer and high school coaches have been trying for years to recruit him to club swimming but he always wanted to play baseball in the fall and spring. Then last spring, he decided that he might want to swim in college. College coaches recruit from club teams so here we are.  

Club swimming is more intense than summer or high school swimming but there's lots of overlap in the personnel. This pool is new to me but I've already run into several people I know. They all said the same thing. "Wait, when did Evan start swimming year round?" And the answer is right now. This is his first club meet. 

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It's 9:05 now and we're watching heat 87 or whatever of Boys 13-18 IM so I feel confident in asserting that the breaststroke events will not start on time. So let's talk about the drive over here. Which was oddly enough completely uneventful and stress-free. This is never the case when I'm driving to a new place but even though the pool is new to me, the route here is easy and the roads are familiar. Had it not been for the sun glare, it would really have been a perfect drive. That's where I am right now. I can drive anywhere or any time, as long as it's full daylight but overcast, dry, and nowhere near the Capital Beltway. 

Yeah I know. 

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9:22. We're about midway through the Girls’ 13-18 Breaststroke. According to the psych sheet, there are 141 entrants in this event, meaning 15 heats (it's a 10-lane pool), assuming that all 141 of them actually show up. I'm going to assume the opposite and say that we'll probably only see 135 or so, so 14 heats. The fastest kids will swim this race in about a minute. I'm going to guess 30 minutes for the entire event so about 15 minutes to go now that we're watching heat 7. 

There's no program for this thing, only the psych sheet. For the uninitiated, the program lists heats and lane assignments for each event, so that swimmers and spectators know exactly when and where a swimmer will race. The psych sheet lists all of the swimmers in an event, ranked from first to last by seed time. Since it's my son's first meet with this club, he has no official time, so he's way down at the end of the rankings, with all of the other NTs. He will probably swim in an early heat and there will be at least an hour between the breaststroke and freestyle events so I might take a walk while I wait. The chlorine is getting to me, and it's a nice day. 

I was right - there were only 11 heats of the girls’ event, Heat 1 of the boys’ event is now underway. It's hard to tell one swimmer from the next when they're all in black suits and team caps but the scoreboard displays the swimmers names, clubs, and lanes, so I know that my son is not in the water yet. But these races move faster with each successive heat so I need to stop writing and start spectating. 

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Can I tell you that my son was in the very next heat after I wrote that paragraph? My timing was impeccable, for once. He crushed it, cruising to a very easy first place in the heat. He won't win the entire event but he's on the radar now. He's no longer a dark horse.

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It's 6:15 Sunday morning and way too early for me to be sitting in the shotgun seat on my way to the aquatic center or anywhere else really, but here I am. I volunteered to be a timer this morning. I really love timing at outdoor meets but not so much at indoor meets. It's cold outside but I'm wearing shorts because it will be tropical on the pool deck. 

My son won his heats in both of his events yesterday. He has one more event today, 100 Butterfly. He loves to swim fly but it's not his best stroke. We'll see what happens. I suppose we'll see full results tomorrow or so. 

I'm glad my husband is driving today. It's still nighttime dark outside, and although I feel that I can still drive in the dark, I don't feel as sure of my driving at night as during daylight. And we all know that my daylight driving is a little dodgy to begin with. So I'm happy to sit in the passenger seat and write the blog equivalent of a shit post while someone else conveys me to the pool. 

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Timing at a club meet is complicated, I tell you what. They use three timing systems; the automatic system that produces the scoreboard display times, a semi-automated backup system, and the good old-fashioned, stopwatch-around-the-neck method that summer swim parents will be very familiar with. I thought I could escape the timing portion of being a timer by volunteering to take charge of the clipboard, but that only got me out of the stopwatch part. I still had to man the backup system. It was a very busy morning, especially the 50-meter races, which move fast even during the early, slower heats. The fast heats are blistering fast, and you need to check your swimmer’s name, time the race, record the backup time, and be ready for the next swimmer in about 25 seconds. There’s no break between heats; swimmers remain in the pool after they finish so that the swimmers in the next heat can dive right over them. It’s ruthlessly efficient. 

My session lasted for four hours. I haven’t told them yet that I’m also a certified stroke and turn judge (but I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from coaching the judge on my lanes, who missed several egregious backstroke turn violations, and a one-armed overhead pull following a turn by a breaststroker) because timing at 6:30 on a Sunday morning is quite enough. But I didn’t mind. It was time well spent. Still, it’s Monday night now and I don’t think I’m as tired now after a full day in the office than I was after a morning on that pool deck yesterday. That was more work than work.