First Ever Women's Relay, and The Best Inspiration Yet!

When I first started swimming with the Masters at our pool, I was the only woman there. Day after day, year after year, it was just me and the guys. Now don't get me wrong, I swim with a really fun group of guys. The best, really. But something was missing.

As a coach, one of the things I most hoped for was to increase the number of women in our program. And in the past few years, our women's participation has picked up steadily until now our lanes are a good mixed bag of guys and gals. But still, many women don't come to the meets - some are triathletes, many have young children, some may be intimidated by competing when they're just starting in Masters swimming. So this year, we finally had enough women at the meet to field a women's relay team, and I can't tell you how exciting that was!

Here we are, ready to swim the Medley Relay and the next day the 200 Freestyle Relay (we went under 2:00!), we had such a good time. What an awesome and strong group of ladies to swim with.

Luckily, the last day of the meet went much more smoothly overall. I avoided chocolate milkshakes altogether, and I turned in some times that I was much happier with. A 6:33 for the 500 was 11 seconds faster than last year's time. That's more like it!

But although the fun of the weekend meet was drawing to an end, the inspiration was far from over. To anyone out there sitting on your couch and thinking you can't do something like this, let me introduce you to the 89 year old lady who swam the 100 IM (that's butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and crawl stroke). Check this out!

In order to not DQ (disqualify) yourself, you have to swim these strokes according to a strict set of guidelines, and this lady can do it. Wow, if that doesn't  inspire you to do your very best at everything, I don't know what will. All I can say, is I hope I'm doing this when I'm 89.