Synchro Masters Nationals

This year we actually have all four of us able and ready for Masters Championships in October.  The meet was in San Ramon, California so we flew and rented a car.  Janice, Nancy, and I stayed at a Air B&B with Pam who drove up to cheer us on and be part of the fun; Dani and Ralph flew separate and stayed at a hotel.  We were there for three days so we bought a shade tarp at Target.com and used it; Pam drove it home for us so we didn't have to throw it out. 

We wore the team shirts I made.

I made Pam a shirt too--this one took a lot of planning with four colors and multiple and layers.

Our team tech music was to Trans Siberian Orchestra's "Sarajevo", and our team free is to "Cell Block Tango" from the Chicago soundtrack.  My solo free was "Mexico", a modified and shortened version of Kirsten & Cloie's duet that I learned choreography from a video--it was a challenging routine.  Dani & Nancy did a duet.  We all did figures. 

We didn't have any coaches travel with us so Head Coach Julee arranged for Teagan, a local coach who used to coach our team years ago, to help us out on team day.  Teagan was helpful with our land drilling and making sure we were lined up on time, but the rest of the time the four of us really had to support each other. 

Results-- We have work to do if we want to be more competitive in routine scoring.  We are still not all moving on the precise counts and we may think we are straight or have straight legs but don't.  We agree that we want to work on team synchronization and strong and sharp execution, which will  mean slowing down our learning of routines to count by count, and hopefully more video recordings at practice for us to see ourselves.  And committing to more land drilling all season long (even when we SAY we are land drilling on the daily, I wonder how honest we are with ourselves and others, and if we are doing it well, count by count).  The spin side is that we all LOVE the sport and we all had FUN!  We are all old enough to know that life is a game of balance and we give each other grace when someone can't always put swim first.

Upon reflection, we also learned that we can work on meet stamina (we were tired by day 3), we need to land drill ALL routines EVERY day, not focusing on one at a time, and -- this is big-- we want to learn how to bling a cap rather than knox our hair for masters, to save time and stress at meets!

Medals from figures for three of us, in different age categories; mine's the silver.

Luckily we didn't run out of gas in the rental car (we couldn't open the gas tank door when trying to fill up on the way back to the airport).