Dear Readers,
Hello! This is going to be a shorter post (as usual?!) because I’m living in the calm before the storm. Class starts on Wednesday (AHHHH! So excited/scared), and so my college life that revolves around school, instead of swimming, will begin again!
Right now, though, I’m still living in the aquatic world. We had a meet last weekend against Smith (senior day!), and since then we’ve been doing our usual doubles, which means swimming twice a day. On Monday and Wednesday we restarted up with weights, which we haven’t done in awhile, so I spent the whole week sore. I’m still sore, in fact, and ready for a day off—my shoulders hurt, my knee hurts, I’ve got sores from my swim suit, I scraped up my elbows on the workout mats, I’ve all sorts of miscellaneous cuts on my hands from collisions with fellow swimmers/evil lane lines, and best of all, I can’t really bend down because we did squats on Monday and Wednesday and that means my hamstrings are dead. No worries, though, because I’m told everyone’s whole body hurts at this point—it was one of our hardest weeks for practices as well :). Sure, swimming’s a no-contact sport—but doing a repetitive exercise for four hours a day, six days a week is going to make anyone tired!
That said, I’ve had a marvelous time with my swimming experience thus far. After Hawaii, the whole team came back even closer than we originally were. I am better friends with several individuals (especially the first-years), and have spent hours hanging out with and talking with others. I know this is crazy, but even after living in close quarters with these girls for more than a month, there’s still no one on the team I don’t like! This is very unusual for any group of people, especially one 25-strong. They have become one of my families, as everyone keeps on saying, because I can go up to anyone on the team and they will support me— no questions asked. If you are athlete, please consider trying out for a team in college. While this can be at any level, I have found particular happiness in my varsity sport experience, without which my college experience would be extremely diminished. Find a group to sit with at lunch (and dinner, and breakfast.). Find people you’ll spend hours sweating with every day. It’ll be worth it.
I’m growing to love Wintersession, because it’s such a no-stress period when I have time to socialize and do team activities. Yesterday Coach Bonnie hosted Puzzle night, and almost the entire team showed up to put puzzles together and make the trail mix provided by Ika and Karina. On Wednesday it was Tiffany’s birthday, and her mother brought in cake for the team to share. She really liked the present I gave her as well, which made me very happy as I don’t often make gifts besides poems to my parents.
Tuesday night was the Babson social, when the neighboring college Babson boys swim team came over for a few hours to hang out with us. There were smoothies and a good time was had by all. Monday night I finally wrote my last Education essay, and am correcting them tonight. Finally, all the work from first semester done!
Sunday night I was invited over to Tiffany’s house with Gabby and Veronica Lin, and we had an absolutely fantastic dinner in celebration of the Chinese New Year. During the day I was working and swimming during all this time, which was fun, but the nights were wonderful.
Now, however, I’m on the bus to our second biggest meet of the year! It’s the Seven Sisters Meet (where five (it used to be seven) of the women’s colleges swim together. We’ve won for the past 14 years, and Bonnie tells us she likes streaks.) It’s at Smith, which is in Northampton, MA. I like Northampton a lot—the stores are really cute/cool/quaint/interesting… you can see I can’t describe towns, but everything is snugger and architecturally more stimulating than in my hometown (Edina is mostly residential, and then our stores are all huge and spaced out by parking lots.)
One of the best things about this meet was that we got to taper for two whole days leading up to it. Yesterday we did one of my new favorite activities: visualization. On my high school team at home we did visualization, but that involved laying down and swimming through your race in your mind. Here, it’s almost like hypnotism: Bonnie tells us to tense all of our muscles and then relax, to go to a safe place, walks us through our events really quickly, brings us back to the safe place, and then wakes us up with “You are now at Wellesley College.” At least I think that’s what happened—most people tend to drift off very quickly. I myself was almost sleeping, which is quite an accomplishment for twenty minutes of laying on a hard pool floor with yelling from diving in the background. In the past, people have complained that they’re not getting any benefit from it since they fall asleep, but Bonnie says that you actually can hear her speaking subconsciously, and that usually people’s fingers twitch when she tells us to “Get up on the blocks and do a start.” I find the whole process fascinating, never having experienced hypnotism myself.
And that’s all that’s going on right now! There are miscellaneous other things (last night, for example, I moved back from my Wintersession room into my real room—that took forever because I packed too much, and it only worked because Tiffany was there to help drive my stuff across campus—thanks Tiff!) but my relaxed, uneventful life continues. At least until Wednesday, when it will get a lot more stressful, but will revolve almost entirely around school, so events may also be scarce :).
So, as always, have a wonderful Friday night! I’m always open for questions (seriously, guys, give me something to talk about in these things!) Recently I’ve been getting a lot of spam (20 spammed comments for the last few quotes. How crazy!), but a real live person would be great to hear from. One sentence, one question, whatever you want, on whatever topic! I’ve lots of opinions, and I’m sure you’re all dying to hear them (ha! ;))
Best wishes to you all!
Monica
ps, the site was down yesterday when I tried to put it up… sorry about that!
