Worth It (Day 376/377)

Picture this. 5:00 AM your alarm goes off, you literally role out of bed, throw on some clothes, brush your teeth, put a bit of makeup on so you don't look dead, and then speed off to the pool. You arrive to a bus with a line of children at the door. You get on by 5:50 and call role, making sure no one will be left behind. You're delayed by some problem and you have to switch buses. The bus you get on doesn't have heat and your toes literally feel like they are dying. You ride for two hours to Oklahoma City and can't sleep between the pain in your toes and the constant bumping of the wheels against the pavement. You're late to warmup and you have to rush your kids into the pool. Now try doing that two days in a row.

That was my weekend. And I will tell you this, I would do it all over if I could have a meet like that one. I have never been more proud of my swimmer than I was this weekend. Next week is the Oklahoma Age Group Championship meet (OAGS) and the meet that was held this Saturday and Sunday was the last time the kids could qualify for it. By the time it had ended we had thirty-one new qualifying times! There were also only a handful of swimmers who didn't get best times in their events. Swim after swim after swim you saw drops. And with almost every new event you saw the Jenks coaches jumping up and down with excitement as our kids got an OAGS time. We were blowing our old times out of the water! There were many kids who dropped exponential amount of time, so much time I didn't know it was possible. There were kids who were so far off OAGS times that we weren't ready for the moment they touched the wall and a qualifying time popped up on the screen. I saw drive and determination I had never seen in some of those kids before. I was impressed and I can be one tough coach to impress. I expect the best from my swimmers and this weekend I feel like I saw the best. So every hour of sleep I lost, every toes that still hasn't recovered from frost bite, every muscle that is sore from riding on a school bus was worth it because those kids, as a whole, had the meet of their life.

Arriving at day one.

 

These kids got new OAGS times! And this was only day one!!

Maybe one of my favorite parts. When baby Kylie, my bus buddy, fell asleep in my lap on the way home. Then we jammed out to Taylor Swift until we pulled into the parking lot. Can I keep her?

Finally made it home! Great meet Jenks!