First Meet

My grand­son swims. In Ari­zona, all pools are open and ath­letes swim here all year round under the open sky, even in win­ter, when the tem­per­a­ture out­side is 13 – 20 degrees dur­ing the day.

My grand­son was not tak­en to the pool in win­ter, and he resumed class­es only recent­ly, when I arrived. He used to go to the younger group, but now the coach said that, in addi­tion to train­ing, he should attend “meets” at least once a week. Meets are com­pe­ti­tions that take place at least once a week and involve sev­er­al swim­ming clubs. They are not aimed at pre­sent­ing some medals and prizes, but at bet­ter­ing their per­son­al results and deter­min­ing whether there is progress in train­ing, and sta­tis­tics of the best and aver­age results are kept based on these results for each age group. These sta­tis­tics can be viewed on the Inter­net, and accord­ing to these results, chil­dren are select­ed for teams of a high­er class. Meets are paid, they cost $5 a dis­tance (a child can swim either one or 10 dis­tances) and the mon­ey goes to the fund of the team hold­ing these com­pe­ti­tions. with these, they pay for the pool and oth­er oper­at­ing expenses.

In Ari­zona, all pools are open and ath­letes swim here all year round under the open sky.

On Thurs­day at 6 pm we went to such a com­pe­ti­tion. At 6 pm it is usu­al­ly very hot, but on this day we were lucky: the day was over­cast, at night even before that there was a good rain, so it was com­fort­able to com­pete and fol­low this event. The only thing every­one was afraid of was that it would not rain, or rather a thun­der­storm, because com­pe­ti­tions in out­door pools imme­di­ate­ly stop, and time would be wast­ed /​mark>. The pool where this event was held was not large, only 5 lanes of 25 yards. A yard is equal to 0.9144 meters, i.e. the lanes are slight­ly small­er than our lanes. Inter­est­ing­ly, even Eng­land has already switched to the met­ric sys­tem, and the Amer­i­cans are all with their own yards.

Sev­er­al age groups per­formed in sev­er­al styles, so the com­pe­ti­tion is always very long and peo­ple come with their fold­ing chairs, tents, cool­er bags, sand­wich­es and drinks.

Our swim­mer com­pet­ed in the youngest age group of 5 – 6 years old, in two events — freestyle and back­stroke. It is inter­est­ing that in the first form — he swam in the last swim of his age group, and it turned out that there were only two of them left, but at the very last moment his oppo­nent became stub­born and refused to swim span> and the grand­son sailed alone. When he swam the dis­tance, and he was giv­en a piece of paper, where the time is fixed and the place that the swim­mer took in the swim, he was incred­i­bly glad that he was the first, despite the fact that he was the only one in his race. Then this piece of paper is pre­sent­ed to the ref­er­ee’s table and there, in exchange for it, they give out a small pen­nant, where the fixed time and place are written.

Then oth­er age groups per­formed, first girls then boys. When it was time to swim on his back, there were already three of them in the swim, and he real­ly swam first. Received my sec­ond pen­nant for first place. A Grand­moth­er, like paparazzi, ran along the pool and took pic­tures of her grand­daugh­ter. The com­pe­ti­tion con­tin­ued, but it was already get­ting dark, and the weath­er began to dete­ri­o­rate again. We packed up and went home, espe­cial­ly since no one here oblig­es you to take part in all types of swim­ming, and the child was already tired, but he was immense­ly happy.