Ethan is on our neighborhood swim team this summer, and Saturday was his first meet.  I had never been to a swim meet before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  This one took place at a community center in Portland with a small pool, in a room barely large enough to hold it!  And to conserve space, I’m pretty sure they decided to multi-purpose the room as a sauna.  In other words, it was HOT!  And there was no moving around, so these shots are all taken from my seat in the observation area, where all of the parents were packed onto hard, hot,  little benches.  Oh, and did I mention it was hot?  Because it was.  Hot.

Ethan participated in four events.  First up was the medley relay.  Here is his team, discussing their order.  He’s in the cap.  He figured if a cap was good enough for Michael Phelps, then it was good enough for him.    (At the bottom of the picture is the edge of the pool.  What they are standing on is the pool deck.  That’s how wide it was, all the way around, with a little more room on the deep end where the timers stood.  It was cramped!  And hot.)

Getting final instructions from the coach, who has been more than patient with all of Ethan’s questions…

Ethan swam the first leg of the medley relay, which is backstroke.  The nice thing about backstroke is you get to start in the water, rather than divejumpflopping off the pool deck.  Most of the older kids have the diving start down.  Ethan is still in the divejumpflop stage.  I was glad to see he wasn’t the only one! 

Solo backstroke came next, and Ethan was the only 7-8 yr old boy doing it.  It’s not his favorite stroke, but I think he does it so well.  This time, he forgot to get his goggles in place, but he just kept right on going anyway.

They were handing out tootsie-pops to the winners, so when he got his and came up to see us, he asked, “Did I get first place?”  Yes, honey, there wasn’t anyone else racing against you.  So you won! 

Next up was breaststroke, which, I believe, is Ethan’s favorite stroke.

As this was just a meet between our small team and their small team, the only boy doing the breaststroke for 7-8 yr olds was also from our team.  He’ll be nine this week and has been on the team before, and he just managed to out-touch Ethan at the wall.  Ethan looked so smooth and relaxed.  I just love watching him swim.

The last event was the freestyle relay.  For all the previous races, Ethan had been swimming a single length of the pool, which is standard for 7-8 yr olds.  For this one, he was put on a team with slightly older boys (9-10) and he swam down and back again.  He was third leg and after his divejumpflop start, he looked fantastic!  Seth video taped the whole thing with our little Flip Video (what a fun gadget that is!), and you can hear one of the other moms say, “Look at him, he’s just floating on the water!”

That pic doesn’t show his form very well, but I have to agree…he looked so smooth and efficient.  We were proud parents.

It was a lot of fun to watch our swimmers and listen to all the parents cheer, for their kids as well as the others.  I reminded myself a few times that these folks all live in our neighborhood.  I’d never seen some of them before.   But I began putting some families together in my mind, and I hope to get to know more as the summer goes on.

When we got home, I watched our video captures, and the freakish, number nerd in me came out in full force.  It’s been awhile since I’ve had anything “competitive” to time with a stop watch, so I timed the relay splits and found that Ethan swam the second fastest leg.  And then I went a step farther.  Ethan just didn’t look like he was working very hard, and yet he had just done an excellent, quick job.  So, I counted his strokes for the two lengths of the pool.  Yep, I did.  And then I counted the strokes of the other boys.  Yep, I did.  Where Ethan took 47 strokes, the other boys took 54, 54 and 76.  No wonder he looked like he was floating!  He’s brilliant, I tell ya! 

Tomorrow is his first day of camp (day camp) so he’ll miss swimming practice this week.  But meet #2 is next Saturday, and it will be a much larger meet at an outdoor pool.  Hopefully it won’t be 105 degrees that day.  ‘Cause that would be hot.  And I’ve already experienced a hot swim meet.