This is a swim meet where instead of teams competing against each other, it girls against boys, and it's really a lot of fun.
Though the meet was a lot of fun, there were a series of events that occurred that were quite unfortunate for me, but hilariously entertaining for others.
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| Though we may look calm and happy, we were all most definitely still thinking about that relay that went wrong. |
It all started with the first relay.
We were doing mixed relays, which means two boys and two girls on each relay, and the relay I was in was the medley, which means that each person swims a different stroke (4 strokes, 4 people in a relay, it makes sense). Anyway, the order for a medley relay is backstroke, then breaststroke, then butterfly, then freestyle. I was scheduled to be doing breaststroke, meaning I should of gone second.
And in a perfect world I would have. But I didn't. The person doing butterfly stepped up on the blocks before anyone could tell him that he was swimming in the wrong order, and started doing butterfly when I was supposed to be doing breaststroke.
The other two members of the relay and I were standing on the deck, watching him do butterfly while every other lane was doing breaststroke. We were kind of worried, I mean we were absolutely going to get the relay disqualified, but mostly we were just laughing. Actually, we were completely cracking up.
We swam the rest of our relay, and went and apologized to our coach. She was being pretty passive aggressive about it, so we could't tell if she was mad or not, but she quickly forgot about. It was after all supposed to be a fun, no-stress meet and she really couldn't get angry because we are just humans and humans make mistakes.
After that whole debacle, my first event was the 100 butterfly. In a typical high school, there's a fifteen minute right after the 50 freestyles, and right before the 100 butterfly. The thing is, is that at this meet there wasn't a break.
So there I was, standing behind lane eight (I was swimming my 100 fly in lane 1), cheering for someone in the last heat of 50 free, thinking I had fifteen before I swam.
That's when I heard the whistle and saw the other people in my 100 fly standing behind the blocks. Then it dawned on me — there wasn't going to be a break. So I took off running to get to my block.
And that's when it happened. That's when my foot slipped and I completely fell onto the deck. I landed smack dab on my left hip in front of everyone.
But I didn't have time to recover from hitting the deck. I had to swim my 100 fly. I guess my adrenalin must of still been running because I hopped right back, ignoring all the people asking if I was ok, and ran to lane one.
I made it there before the event started, but my cap and googles weren't on. I frantically pulled them over my head while looking at the starter (who controls when the events are swam). He gave me a sympathetic look and announced that they would wait for me. I breathed out a sigh of relief and finished putting my cap and goggles on.
The event, surprisingly, went ok, though I was still shaking my fall when I got out of the water.
I walked over to the coach, laughing, because I couldn't believe what my night had become. I told what had happened, and she too laughed at me.
The rest of the evening was fairly uneventful. I went and talked to my mom, and upon seeing my hip completely black and blue and bleeding, she made me go get an ice pack.
I swam the 100 breaststroke, and I added a significant amount of time because I could only swim with one leg. Usually, a person would get disqualified from an event using only one leg, but the officials must of not been paying attention or they just gave me the benefit of the doubt.
My hip remained swollen for days after the incident, and I still have scratches from where it was bleeding, but it's all in the past now, and I can laugh about it.
So there you have it — when everything goes wrong, you just have to laugh about it, because I assure you, everyone else is already laughing.
Up and out,
Elise :)
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