The Remedial Group

I have never been very good at spelling. This was a major issue as a child, as school classes were divided up into groups based on their spelling ability. There was the high level spelling group (the one this guy owned, I am sure), the mid level group, and the dumbass kids. I was in the group of dumbass kids.

To stroke my ego I always told myself that there was no correlation between spelling ability and intelligence. Mind you I kept telling myself that when we were spelling words with no more than 4 letters (and often spelling them wrong). In the end I think I have been vindicated. There were three of us in the dumbass group: Mark O, Kristin R, and myself (not putting full names to protect the innocent). While I have no idea what happened to old Mark O, (Google on revealed he attended his 10 year reunion at North High in Des Moines), last I heard from Kristin R is she is messing with the genetic code of corn for a large company near Des Moines. Thus, at LEAST 2/3 of the bad spelling group has managed to go on to hold jobs at a relatively higher level than our spelling ability would suggest.

Sorry, I digress.

The point is I have never much cared for being in the remedial group. Like most runners/triathletes I own a bit of a competitive streak. Not that I want to win every event, I am not that good at this sport of multisport yet, but I’ll be damned if I am the worse.

So after my smashing success in my Freestlye 1 class, I assumed I would be able to jump right into masters practices with the Chicago Blue Dolphins and be the hero. When I arrived last night, first thing I noticed is Coach Fitz from my swimming class wasn’t there. Not a big deal, I knew he only runs about half of the practices. This particular practice was run by two of his junior coaches (one who had subbed in for one of my classes, the other one was a Domer). I explained that I had just finished the Freestyle 1 class and I should be assigned to their expert group. Jess (the Domer) put me in the “Transition” group. I am not exactly sure what that means, but I can only assume it’s “man who sinks” transitioning to “man who may or may not sink.”

How did the practice go? Not really that bad. Most of it was stroke work and drills, but we didn’t swim for anything longer than 25 yards at a time.

I don’t want to belittle how much my swimming has improved since last year this time; in fact I feel very comfortable swimming freestyle. But I leave a little to be desired when it comes to the drills, and to be honest, while improved, I am still need to work on get the muscle memory to work for swimming. For example, we did 12 25’s at the end of practice, and I only used 17 strokes for the first 3, but then I couldn’t hold that level of efficiency for the rest. [To put this into perspective, I think my friend Charlie said he is down to 11 strokes. Of course he is going to swim the English Channel this summer.]

The coaches were very helpful, but I kind of hope I can sneak into the level one group next time. We will see.

Swimming
Chicago Blue Dolphins practice, around 1.5 hours

Note: GO IRISH!! Beat Patriots! (George Mason, 1st Round NCAA, 9 PM CST, CBS)