Once again, the Illinois State meet was held outside Illinois! This time in Muncie Indiana. Large pool, good facilities, and overall a good experience, except the “getting there” part (and virtually mandatory overnight stay).

As usual I swam the Friday event (this year 1000yd) and then whatever I could snag some points in for the team. State meet is far from an individual event – to compete, as a team, is to be selective about where you compete-  because you are limited in what you can do each day.

Leading up to state my swim training had been going great from “end of triseason” September through January. I had a particularly amazing day in early January where I ran 2 hours and then swam 5500yds right after (that time of year 4000yds would be about the max). I was feeling great, had moved up to lane 5 (I’ve been stuck in lane 4 for many years) and was looking forward to extending that training through the rest of the season and into the next tri-season.

However, in late Jan I got sick (flu, cold, whatever) and starting feeling really tired, so we pulled back my training of course, and unfortunately this pattern just continued this spiral downwards until the point where by March I wasn’t training much at all and I was sleeping all the time. Because I am most resilient in swimming this meant it got cut first and basically my 15,000yds/wk dropped to 10,000 dropped to 3000 dropped to maybe 1000. I was lucky to get a swim every 2 weeks.

So when state rolled around I was coming off yet another cold and virtually no training.  It is what it is – no PRs for me, but due to my event placement, if I could simply FINISH my events I would capture some points for the team – so I went.

I will not go through the gory details because it was a very hard meet for me and I swam very poorly (which was as expected but it still hard not to feel like you are letting my team down):

1000yd Free – 8th place – 3 points
400IM – 6th place – 5 points
200IM Relay  4th place –  14 points
400 Free Relay – 5th place – 12 points
200 Free – 8th place – 3 points
50 Breast – 9th place – 2 points
200 Breast – 6th place – 5 points

So, just by showing up, I managed to score points in every event I swam. All goes to show you never know who will show up on any given day and you just need to get out there and do it!