Sprints, Meets, and Mental Swimming

     Hey! So.... wowza I haven't been on this blog in FOREVER! So on Friday (aka yesterday) we did some sprint things at morning practice. Expresso and I were partners! What we did was we went to different sides of the pool (and it is long course so it's like 50 meters across) and we raced to the middle. Our coaches stood there and called out the winner. We did it 10 times and the person who lost the most times had to do ten push ups for every loss.... So Expresso and I planned it so that we would each win 5 and then it would be put up to a tie-breaker. The tie breaker was a one hundred free.
     Here is how it went: Expresso won the first two
                                      I won the second two (we did that one more time so we each had 4 wins)
                                      Expresso won one and then I did
     Then our coach had each pair that tied line up on the same side of the pool.  We then raced a one hundred! To be honest with you... I debated cheating or like purposely doing a crappy turn so I hit Expresso in the face! But I decided to just put it up to chance. We were like DEAD EVEN for like the whole thing! Maybe we would like be just barely ahead of the other at one point or another, but then the other would catch up.  So after about 87.5 meters I just SPRINTED for my life. She did too.... So we are like pushing it to the limit and then we hit the wall.
     Just about everyone thought it was a tie... but Expresso's coach said that Expresso won. I was so angry that she would pass judgement when the people standing right in the gutter looking down said it was a tie. So I kinda called out Expresso's coach. She got sooo pissed and said that at practices like that she didn't have any favorites. I felt kinda bad afterwords so I apologized that evening for saying it.
     This week I had two swimmeets (ick). I think that I did soo bad! On Tuesday I gained two seconds on my 500 free. That was the first time that I have ever gained on it. The 200 IM I swam on that day I didn't even really bother trying. The pool sucked and was super small with no warmdown pool. Everyone felt like crap and swam like it! On Thursday my coach put me in different events than what he normally puts me in for highschool meets. Generally I swim the 200 IM and the 500 free but instead he put me in the 100 butterfly and the 100 backstroke. It was kinda a noduh that I would drop time on my fly; I had not swam it in awhile and the last time that I did I was sick so it was nowhere near my best USA Swimming time.  On my backstroke... well I gained like 2 seconds :P Ya it was rather disappointing. I don't even want to talk about the relays that I swam. They sucked and I felt so uninspired with my teams performance.  It just goes to show (in my opinion) that swimming is all mental and if you aren't happy with your team and you aren't inspired to do your best and thinking that you won't or can't do well... You won't.