I’ll start with last night. We dominated the 4×200 freestyle relay, which I mentioned before, in expected fashion. For the purists out there, I believe we did eclipse the former world record the Aussie’s set in 2001 in textile suits, so that was cool. The race for second was pretty close with Japan out-touching Australia. Anyways, clearly the best race of the night was our team manager’s van versus the Aussie motor coach back to the hotel dinner line. Our manager tried all the tricks in the book to beat the bus but the breaks weren’t coming our way…until the end when we sped around other cars to take the lead. Our driver was a rock star, and I may, or may not have influenced the driver to go faster. On the road: USA -1, AUS -0. The best part was this morning when the Aussie driver was complaining to me about some animal driving one of our vans and almost running him off the road. He was angry. I just smiled the grin of victory and went on with my life.
And by went on with my life, I meant have a very disappointing 400 freestyle. I ended up 4th and adding a few tenths from Nationals. Right now, I don’t even know what went wrong, I felt pretty good and thought I was going to post a fast time. I was legitimately surprised when I saw my time on the board. It’s been a long few weeks of travel/racing, but I really expected to do a lot better in that event because I was feeling pretty good. It’s gonna take some time for me to break down and figure out what happened so I can fix it. Oh well, not all swims are excellent, it’s the bad ones you learn from. It was nice to see my parents after the race somehow happy about my swim. I swear, I could have been disqualified and they would be proud. That’s the best part.
Last day in the pool tomorrow. 800 free, gotta make something happen
It was some tough competition in the 400 free but my friends and I were definitely cheering for you! The race back to the hotel dinner line sounds like it was one for the history books too.
Best of luck in the 800 free!