Oh hey.
So Thanksgiving break was such a nice break from school. It was very much needed, as is the swiftly-approaching Christmas break in T-minus one week. While in Oakland, I was able to swim in an outdoor pool which was something I have not had the pleasure of doing since Y nationals. The air was in the 50s, but the pool was heated so it was nice. I also swam in a 25 meter pool one time there, which is something I haven’t done in a while. It was kind of frustrating swimming in the 25 meter pool because the lanes were tiny and I had to share with slow middle aged people who were in awe of my ability to swim butterfly.
Also, Vero fed me super well, and I am still trying to burn off all of the delicious homemade thanksgiving food and desserts that she and John had prepared. I also had a bunch more banana bread with nutella, and ice cream, and chocolate, and like 8 cookies one night. Oh man.
It was really good seeing all my cousins and their spouses, too. Theres nothing like spending a few days eating, socializing, playing card and board games, and sleeping. It took me until my final day there to start doing a bit of homework, which was an ugly self-reminder that I had to return to school the next day.
Since the Thanksgiving weekend was a bit of a swim break, it was interesting getting back into swimming when we resumed practice on Monday. However, we rested that week since we had the big Husky invite that coming weekend. At around the time of the beginning of break, my shoulder started bugging me a little bit again. Since then, I started icing it a lot more since I stopped icing and doing special exercises since my shoulder felt perfectly fine before then. This week, I started doing my exercises again. I also figured out that I was doing something wrong in my freestyle. After I changed my stroke a bit, I noticed that the discomfort was virtually gone and I feld smoother and faster in the water.
You can see the results of the meet
here, and the school wrote about us
here. Since we didn’t do a real taper, shave, or wear brand new fast suits, we didn’t expect to totally blow the competition away, but we did expect to swim pretty fast. A few people did phenomenal, and most everyone else did very well. As for myself, I was only a few seconds off my best times and I can now see where I need improvement in training. In fact, another swimmer and I approached Steve and asked if we could do a little more stroke in practice since we tend to mostly do freestyle sets. Much to other people’s dismays, we’ve done basically only stroke this week. People hate us. Haha. Ha. Haha. But it kinda sucks because that means I have to do a lot more fly now, which is fun in small amounts I suppose. I just hope Steve doesn’t go crazy with the fly sets now.
School has been a giant ball of stress in my life, simply because we left Thursday morning for the husky invite and returned at 2:30am Monday morning. This weekend left virtually no time for homework or really anything, since the day consisted of breakfast, swimming prelims, napping, and swimming finals. So since Monday, and even currently, I’ve spent nearly all my free time doing homework and a little bit of final review. This explains why I haven’t updated the ol’ blog in so long.
On the bright side, school is almost over for the semester, and Jan term will be refreshing with only one class to focus on, and it should be an interesting class, as well (African life and culture).
Last night was the BJ Christmas party. I wasn’t going to go for very long, but since it sounded so raucous and fun from my room, I stopped by a few times to grab a cookie and hot cocoa, and ended up staying for about 45 minutes at one point to play “musical knees” (which is like musical chairs but the girls were the chairs) and to listen to Christmas stories that Evan, an RA, read to us all with a very animated voice. That was about the only fun I’ve had all week though.
Tomorrow I have my last Calc 2 exam, which I’m ready for. I also have some Chemistry homework due tomorrow which I haven’t looked at yet. Blah there is just so much to do! I was busy doing other homework and studying and lab reports the past few days so that I couldn’t look at the Chemistry. Anyways, I have all of tonight after swim practice to do homework, so I will do just that. Speaking of which…I have to go to practice right now. Stay classy!
