Saturday's meet was pretty much exactly the opposite of the one in Ohio. There, if you recall, we all did pretty terribly as individuals, but did quite well overall as a team. This time, we all swam excellent individual races - everybody dropped time off their events, in some cases a LOT of time - and yet we just weren't good enough to beat the other teams that came. I'm not sure where exactly we ranked in the scheme of things, but it wasn't great. Anyhow, I swam the 500 free for the first time in a meet and got a 7:16. I was originally hoping to break 7 minutes, but then I lowered my goal to just try to break my best practice swim of 7:26, and I certainly did that. I'll shoot for 7 minutes at the next meet. I also braved the 200 free for the first time since Tulane last spring (where I lost count and thought I was done after six laps...) and came away with 2:41, which is a 13-second drop! ("It looked awesome!" Anna said later.)

I mean, those aren't great times, not by any standard - I'd ideally like to raise them to about 6:20 and 2:15 - but they represent significant personal improvement over the past year, and especially over the last six weeks (is that all it's been?) since I've been home, lifting weights and swimming Brandon's 5000-yard practices. I came away from the meet feeling physically and mentally tired, as always, but also rather satisfied with myself. That's a novelty for me. Like I said, I usually sign up for the sprint events (50s and 100s) so they'll be over faster, but the small detail I've been ignoring is that I am not a sprinter. I always come out of those races (a) last, and (b) very frustrated. At this meet, I finally got up the guts to do an event which is more suited to my abilities, and as a result I was neither last nor frustrated.

Let the record show: from this day forward, I will no longer deny that I am a distance swimmer! Admitting it is the first step, right? Hear me now, Internet - I'm one of those chicks who swims the 'boring' events, the ones nobody wants to watch, the races where the spectators take snack breaks and strike up conversations... and I'm proud of it! :)