The competition pool, cont.

Well, unfortunately my blogger was being a little bugger last night so I thought it wasn't posting. Apparently it worked, and so did the other 14 or so reminders I sent out through other people about the Today Show. Needless to say, I was pretty excited about being on my favorite show! But sorry about the bombardment of reminders!
So, what I really wanted to write about yesterday was about us returning to the venue. We've spent a lot of time at the American College of Greece training, but we decided we needed to head back over to the venue to begin getting a feeling for the pool there. We arrived early and did a very thorough warm up. Our coach thought it would be good training for us to do a full performance, right out of the bag. The way it works is that each country gets 40 minutes of music time in the competition pool per day and they can do with it they want. The time is usually broken up between the duet technical and free programs and the team technical and free program. So we started our 40 minutes with a "performance" of our technical program, just like we will do on the 26th, our first day of competition. I gave a little talk to the girls before we began our walk onto the deck. As I started talking to them about the crowd that would be there when we swam and the fans back home that would be watching and the other countries that would be anticipating our swim, I sensed a jitter starting to creep into the team. We were getting over-amped and I could really sense it. We hit the deck and started our deckwork where we lift two of the girls into a cheerleading type lift on the deck. But because we were so over-amped, one of the girls pitched forward and fell into the water early, before the music started. The wind sort of got knocked out of our sails. We were wasting precious music time and had to get back on the deck and start over, everyone feeling a little non plussed. The music came on again and we started to swim. Our swim through was frantic, I tried to yell out during the swim for everyone to "Calm down!" but our energy was just bouncing off each other instead of being one force. The stands felt overwhelming and the water felt so different from the water at the American College. We all knew that the performance wasn't what our coach wanted and the feeling was verified as we swam over to her after the swim. We knew we were going to have to make it up somehow, and in the next 30 minutes! We swam our techincal program section by section working to improve on the performance. We succeeded but we were still feeling a little overwhelmed. The techical duet swam next, allowing the team to regroup a little bit and prepare for our free program. As soon as the duet finished, they sprinted to the deck to start the free program warm up with us. (this is very exhausting, our duet is super tough!) We were going to swim our free program section by section and we knew it had to be good. Right before we hit our deck pose the Spanish coaches walked in, obviously there to observe our practice. A little shudder went through us, the music started and we were off! Every pattern, every lift started to flow. One thing to the next, our confidence building. At the end of the first section, we stopped, looked to our coach and got an encouraging look before starting the next section. We all knew we were flying through the routine it and it felt great! We continued to the end of the routine, and absolutely nailed our last lift with a flourish. When we hit the surface at the end of the routine there was clapping and cheering from the volunteers and other athletes who had stopped to watch our warm up. That felt good. And there was obvious unrest from the Spanish contingency in the bleachers, that felt even better. So, we had saved ourselves in the free program, and we knew we had some talking to do about the technical. As we waited for the bus, I did a quick interview with our media girl. She asked me how I thought things were going and how our chances were for a medal. Nice timing I thought. But I was instantly reminded of one of my favorite quotes. "Always reach for the moon, because even if you miss you'll still be among the stars." Obviously everyone comes to the Olympics to win, but if you let that thought consume you, you can lose sight of what this whole experience is all about. That sort of thing has been happening a lot all around us at these Games. That night I had a great talk with my coach (therefore it was too late to write in my blog!) We decided that we weren't going to be weighed down anymore by fear or pressure or any other yucky stuff. We were going to have fun! That's what this team is all about. We love what we do and we have fun when we're doing it right. So one handshake of agreement and a hug later, Chris and I were set. We both saw each other the next morning, smiling and lauging, even at 7 am and we knew it would be a good day.........