On Endings

January 14, 2009: The First Day of The Rest of Our Lives

Then:

Now:

What a difference a day makes.

We all arrived safely back in Oberlin last last night without even any flight delays. After a full day of swimming and travel we were simply beat, so we all went back to our dorm rooms, apartments, and houses to sleep off the trip. Thankfully Mark Fino, being as weary as the rest of us, decided to give us today off.

It's amazing how quickly life returns to normal (or whatever amounts to it at Oberlin). Waking up in a room that I've seen one night in the past three weeks didn't even faze me, nor did walking across the frozen tundra of North Quad and Wilder Bowl to get to Dascomb for lunch. It all seemed pretty normal. In a few days the only reminders of Florida will be our gloriously tan bodies and the aches that those bodies give us when we try to swim.

Tomorrow it will be back to work with a new practice schedule, a pool that we've heard hasn't had its heater on in a while, and cold and snow to enjoy on the trek to practice instead of sunny, musical car rides.

So what, in the end, was the trip for? Several of my fellow swimmers have expressed the sentiment that the trip was an enjoyable experience, and in the end, I think it really was. Sure, the swimming was extremely rough, but it's not like we would have been worked any easier back in Oberlin. But we did get to relax in the sun, bond with our fellow swimmers, and generally enjoy being at 80 degrees in January.

At the end of Florida (and throughout Winter Term) everybody on a team gets just the tiniest bit sick of seeing each each other all day, every day. But at the same time, all that time together allowed us to bond as a team. There are stories to tell about this trip that I haven't had the time to tell (like when Corey, Jake, and Johnny took a kayak out without paddles and capsized at least three times), stories that I probably shouldn't repeat on this blog, and probably tons of stories that I don't even know about. It's all these shared experiences that bring us together and truly make us a team.

So Florida is just another of those experiences. It's tiring, it hurts. But Mark Muthersbaugh may have put it best driving to our last practice (and his last Florida practice ever):

"You know, we're all bitching about Florida. But you know we'll all be back next year."

See you next year.

Total Yards Swum: 0. And Counting.

A few notes on the blogging experience:

-Thanks to everyone who has been reading and pointing out my mistakes. I usually type out my entries as mostly stream-of-consciousness works and therefore am prone to making typos and errors. Luckily, my fellow swimmers and readers, being all bright people, are quick to call me out on these mistakes, from my simply forgetting "the"s and "of"s to more substantial mistakes like describing short-course swimming as being 25 meters (we actually do 25 yards) or over-exaggerating the feats of our alumni friend Fred Bobb (who has written to tell me that he swims three times a week, not the twice a day that I had him at. Still very impressive).

-Speaking of Fred Bobb, Scott sent me the picture of him and the Oberlin breastrokers before our big race:

Jebran, Fred, Me, Mike, and Bud proving that breastrokers are awesome.

-My dad has been making very interesting Google Maps from the meterage markers I've been giving out at the end of each blog entry. The final map can be found here. The rings are centered on the pool at Founder's Park and go out for each measurement I gave here in this blog. It looks like we made it a good third of the way to Cuba!

-To any readers who have read this blog and wanted to get into swimming or learn to swim (which I think is the wrong lesson to pick up), I know Oberlin College offers swim lessons at Phillips Gym. Other then that ask around at your local YMCA (where I learned to swim) or swimming pool during the summer. Chances are they have lessons programs or a swim team of their very own.

-As for me, I've work to do. Not done with Winter Term just yet. Probably later today I'll start another blog for the remainder of Winter Term, which will be less focused then this one. (Translation: Less swimming and more swears.) I'm flip-flopping about whether to post the link here: if all the nice parents and followers of my swimming want to read my rambling thoughts about nothing in particular, shoot me a line.

-Thanks are in order: Thanks to my family, my Mom and Dad, and Peter and Stephanie, who are always wildly encouraging of my stupid ideas. Thanks to my fellow swimmers who make swimming bearable. Thanks to my roommates: Chris, Jebran, Jon, and Nick, who lived with, slept with, watched TV with, massaged with, and most importantly fed me this past week. Thanks to all the seniors and coaches who drove us around in Florida, especially Mark, who probably should have kicked me out of the Kia a few times. Thanks to the nice people of Tavernier, Islamorada, and Key Largo, who put up with more then they deserve, and thanks to the people at Ocean Pointe Suites and Founder's Park who had us for a week. Thanks to Mark Fino for suggesting and supporting this blog, and mostly thanks to all the readers and commenters.