I love the smell of chlorine in the morning

At 8:00 this morning, I dropped the kids off at the high school to catch the bus down to Elizabethtown for the '07 Fall Preview swim meeet. I drove down later, stopping by Barnes and Noble for hot chocolate along the way, and arriving in time for the 10:30 start time. I found a spot on the crowded bleachers and sat there until well into the afternoon.

This was a huge meet, with 15 schools participating. Each event was 50 yards, with the top 30 in each returning in the afternoon to compete in 100-yard heats. Mike participated in breaststroke and freestyle, and Annabelle did freestyle.

In her heat, Annabelle was a little motorboat and came in first! She beat out another seventh grader, 2 eighth graders, a ninth grader, and an eleventh grader, finishing in 38.82 seconds:



Mike's time in the breaststroke (34 seconds) put him in eighteenth place and qualified him to swim in the 100 this afternoon. He was the only boy on our team to qualify for the 100's! He hung with the pack through most of the heat but just wasn't able to pull it out in the end. At 1:21.74, he finished last, but he's even more determined to work hard to improve his time through the rest of the season. You can see that he's got a nice, strong stroke:



Here's Mike at the end of the meet:



You wouldn't believe how exhausting watching swimming can be. I'm beat!