swim season!

Swim Season is once again upon us in Fresno Unified. This year the McLane team has about 15 dedicated kids and another 15 who are trying things out. A bit smaller than last year (and water polo) but they are already showing some significant results and training much better than in years past. It's SO great to watch kids that I (sometimes literally) taught how to swim/play water polo now going and teaching others how to do it... hearing one's own words come out of the mouth of another is one of those shining moments as a coach.

A kid I am trying to really help (it worked during water polo...) who currently has a 0.0 GPA and almost as many suspensions this school year alone as he is years old (14 years old... 13 days total of suspension this school year.) came out to the pool today and I'm taking him and his friend to the pool tomorrow at 5:45 am for 6am morning practice. As previously mentioned we had 7 kids there on Wednesday - the extra practice is what will make us a REAL swim team. Tonight at the gym I was able to get some strength training in as well as swimming; tomorrow morning I plan to swim some too.

Hopefully a bike ride this weekend with the girlfriend and... no... kids... !

http://www.kidstricamp.com is our kids triathlon camp website

http://www.splashdashfresno.com is our big RACE website (entry forms are coming in!)

http://www.tri-this.org is Tri-This's website!

Another successful camping trip

This weekend saw 7 students and three adults going up to Folsom Lake to volunteer once again with Total Body Fitness. (http://www.tbfracing.com) Awesome company, awesome people.

I have to say I wasn't really ready for this trip in a few ways. I was feeling pretty drained from an exhausting week (have I mentioned how I'm ready for night school to end? 4:45-8:30pm twice a week is getting to me now that I'm coaching swimming too...) and ... dealt with more cancellations than normal because I didn't think it was a big enough of a deal to enforce the $5 a week before the trip policy. Thankfully I have a pretty large reservoir of kids to pick from as backups, so we found the kids to fill the spots no problem. I literally wrote kids names down on pieces of paper this time, and it ended up being 3 of the same kids that go on every single trip... kinda crazy. (Aaron, Albert, Billy).

Newcomers Rogelio, Michael B, and Jr. came along for the ride and volunteering too. Rogelio and Jr had only expressed an interest in triathlon stuff before, mostly water polo (rogelio did a great job his first year of water polo last year) and Jr. (I'm trying to get him to do swim team still.) Mike has expressed interest for sure but his mom hadn't let him do tri stuff before. He is on the Dive/swim team this year and played water polo last year (would have been MVP for JV but his attendance was spotty.) They did great.

Saturday probably because I was tired things weren't the best behavior-wise. I'm not used to having to really enforce things on triathlon trips - with the veterans I tend to have zero problems because they know what to expect and also what consequences will happen. So instead of me doling out pushups or other tasks I just kinda got frustrated. And took it out on meagan (girlfriend who came with me!). Whups. I recovered by nightfall and when I did walk over to their tent and told them no more talking... there was ... no more talking :-) Oh, I forgot to buy buns for the hotdogs and forks for cup-o-noodles that were donated for the trip... but i mean, it's a camping trip so I thought that just added to the camping trip charm.

And they got up and did a great job this morning cleaning up before we left. Kids and myself did everything from directing traffic to cooking to organizing and cleaning.

Afterwards we went to the obligatory Round Table pizza in old down sacramento that is cool because of two things - 1) To get in you walk down underneath the sidewalk and 2) $7 all you can eat pizza and salad bar buffett!

Some good conversations were definitely had this trip and it all worked out in the end. When I got home I took a SHOWER my first in two days after running around like crazy last night playing tag and then sleeping in the rain basically and volunteering in the rain all day... aka my suburban smells like wet dog, but it's more like teenage boy smell too which isn't a good thing. Poor Meagan!

I've typed too much; just waiting for my laundry to be done so I have something to wear tomorrow!

salsa dancing

Back for another post this morning.

Last night (the day before valentines day) I went salsa dancing with Meagan and some friends. It was some instructional thing-before-dancing, and it was kinda fun. Moreso for the people and the activity than the actual dancing (I still suck) but it's all good and it was indeed for valentines day! Then we went to a place afterwards for beer and food. always a good time and this week was pretty rough school-wise, so it was good to just... be 25 :-)

I'm itching for night school to be over in two week so I can begin seriously training for swimming. Although for the first time in several months I made it to a pool and swam hard three times this week, which was very encouraging. My shoulder was starting to have some pains on Friday so I've been stretching it this morning in preparation for a mixed weights/swimming sesson in a bit here.

For weights, I work mainly on a rowing machine, lats, abs, and some legs too since I'm doing less running now. Obviously it's more about the duration of the set than pure weights... 4 sets of 10 or 15 with less weight, etc. I love that feeling of swimming after some weights when the arms and legs feel so heavy! Lets me know I've done my workout job correctly :-)

Oh, and federal tax exemption was mailed off and received by the IRS this week, I made myself a Tri-This! shirt to wear around town that says coach dorman on the front, and the Kids Tri Camp is really shaping together nicely. Also the Splash and Dash's (http://www.splashdashfresno.com) active.com registration is good to go and we've been receiving entry forms!

just an update

Things have been really busy around here lately... to sum it up, we're finally really almost ready to send off the papers for non profit status... registration and online registration is up and running for the Splash and Dash event, sponsors are happening and the Kids Tri Camp is almost ready to be unveiled to the public as well... etc.

and the new way of teaching math is going 50/50, with two classes doing AWESOME with it and 2 of them not as much. but it still gives me thrills when one of my students who in all reality is a gang member states something like,

"so after we do the rational root theorem, we use synthetic division to find the other roots?"

- priceless!

peace and love. off to go swimming! (the marathon attempt last weekend at hungtington made it 18 miles but i didn't want to push it after that because I knew I wasn't ready... but it was a lot of fun! Now i'm training strictly for swimming and cycling for a while... just to see how fast i can get swimming-wise!)