This weekend was the last and biggest swim meet of the season --- the 2011 SSL Champs! In the past this has only been a single day event for us – really a ¾ day as Christian would swim the short freestyle and backstroke and that was it. No relays, no finals… 2 events and we were done by 2pm. Last year we hung out and watched the finals and relays.
This year everything changed. As a 7/8 Christian can add on breaststroke and butterfly to his events which means attending Sunday as well as Saturday. He has also been swimming well in his age group which means he is swimming on the relay teams – the last event held each day! So we had 2 long, but fun, days out at Champs. Of course, we had our issues while there too!
Saturday was the team parade and cheer, a fun event. Then backstroke in the morning and freestyle in early afternoon… And then came our long break! We probably should have left for lunch and came back later, but I wanted to film our Coaches kids swimming in the finals. They also allowed parents in the water for adult swim time – nice and cooling! Finally, 4 hours later, the relays were up. So how did he do on Saturday? He did not beat his best time on backstroke, but did on freestyle 
There were 110 swimmers in the backstroke event and Christian came in 65th… Out of 85 swimmers in the 7/8 Boys Short Freestyle he came in 26th place. The top 20 make the consols/finals so he was just out of the range there. For the medley relay Christian swam the Butterfly leg and they ended up DQ’ing. I was unofficially told that it was because the swimmer after Christian dove in just before Christian touched the wall. Oh well.
Sunday we were able to show up a 30 minutes later then we did on Saturday, but he swam first thing in the morning. He warmed up and then went straight to the ready bench. He swam breaststroke and came out of the pool thinking that he DQ’d – though he did swim his fastest Breaststroke. We did find out later that he did DQ 
An hour or so later he swam Butterfly and beat his best time again! Out of 83 swimmers he came in 39th. Then we hung out, ate lunch, I filmed the coaches kids in their finals and finally the freestyle relay came up. Christian swam on the ‘A’ relay team since we didn’t have a lot of swimmers attending and did well. We beat our calculated best time and came in 7th place, so that was good. He earned a medal with the relay team
The only issues we had were on Saturday Christian was heading to the ready bench and a teammate cut his hand – but of course Christian was doing things he shouldn’t do… Sunday Christian was bugging a teammate and his teammate elbowed him --- crying ensued, but he got what was coming to him. He was tired Sunday, as a result of the elbow he decided to act out a bit and started to scratch up his goggles and things like that. Whatever… Get over it. In the tent he continued to sulk, barely ate lunch though he got exactly what he asked for etc… Later in the day he got his second wind and changed his behavior and all was good.
So he swam fine – some good, some okay. Overall he’s had a great season and I’m very proud of what he’s accomplished!