So...I'll back up for you for a second. Friday, Conference, things went well. Not quite the dives I was hoping for, but by the Lord's grace, I snuck in to a second Nationals qualification. I was really happy. As the meet was over I just couldn't stop thinking about how amazing our God is. He wanted me to be able to send in a tape. Hands down. There are no other explanations. He is so good and so worthy of our praise! .2 is nothing. It literally was a miracle.
As I was marveling at the Lord's kindness, I was also getting excited for Saturday. Saturday I was going to pole vault at another indoor track meet. I need to get a higher height in order to actually go to Nationals, so was looking forward to doing that. But, back to Friday, after I was done diving in the morning, I ended up going to pole vault practice, since I was going to be vaulting the next day. Diving was done since I couldn't come back at night, so was transitioning over to vaulting. I went to practice and things went well. I was a little tired, understandably so, but pushed through and had a decent practice. I went straight from track practice back to the pool to cheer for the night session. And then this is what happened...
I'm sitting at the diving table, with the computers and everything for the scoring talking to Al, when Joe walks up. Joe is one of my favorite people ever. He's a diving coach (well...we all joke that he's "just and EX-high school coach"... which he is, but he's a really really good coach who knows a TON about diving) and he comes and helps us out a lot. We met him while we had to practice at the high school while our amazing pool was being built the last two years. Anyway, he's awesome and we get along really well. He's always causing trouble...one of those... :) Well, when Joe found out that I wasn't scoring points for the team, lets just say he was less than thrilled... So back to the story...he walks up to me and says, "do you have your suit here?" I said, "Joe, I'm not diving." Again, he asks, "do you have your suit here?" I asked why and told him again that I wasn't diving. A third time, he asked if I had my suit. I looked at him like he was crazy and said "yeah."
I was really confused, but, whatever. Joe is crazy. So as I'm talking to Al I see Joe walking around and talking to all the diving coaches of the other teams there. He was up to something, I knew it. Joe is always up to something. So I start to get the idea that Joe wants to make something work so that I can dive at night. I REALLY didn't want to. I walked into the locker room and just started to pray. I was tired, I had just pole vaulted after diving all morning, and had COMPLETELY checked out of the meet mentally. I whinned to God for a little bit telling him how I didn't want to dive, and then got over myself and just said, "ok Lord, if you really want me to dive tonight, I will." Yeah...you say that, and then 3 seconds later you eat your words.
So I come out of the locker room and my coach Aaron is there. He says, "you need to go talk to Joe." So I find Joe and he sits me down. He tells me that he's talked to all of the diving coaches and all of them have agreed. If I want to, I can dive tonight, as a ninth diver, still not counting for points, but as an opportunity to try and qualify for Nationals again and get a better meet tape. He said it was totally up to me. He didn't care either way. They had to run it by the Conference Committee, but they didn't want to ask them if it was okay if I didn't want to do it. Now, I really really did not want to dive. Did I mention that? But at the same time, I knew I would be crazy to pass up an opportunity. Especially one that caught me off guard (which means I didn't have time to freak out about my dives) and one that completely didn't matter. How I dove that night, didn't matter at all. I had already gotten my two qualifying scores and I wasn't counting for points. So I said I would do it.
The committee voted and unanimously decided to let me dive again that night. Which was really awesome, because like I had said earlier, that was the real reason I was sad I didn't count for points. I now had that opportunity back.
Oh yeah, and all this happened in about 3 minutes, while all the girl divers were warming up. Turns out we didn't need to warm up that early cause swimming took forever, but it was fine. It was just hard because we kept warming up thinking we were up soon. Warming up so many times was just draining my energy. I had already been diving all morning and then went to track and was now diving again. It was all too crazy.
Well, I dive a lot better without any pressure or expectations, so that was good. I was able to improve my score from the morning by a couple points, and I ended up qualifying again! So it was a successful night. And the Lord gets all the glory! I am so blessed to have people looking out for me and so willing to make things work for my benefit. It really is a huge blessing.
So after a very exhausting day, I came home and blogged for a little bit, but wasn't able to get all of that down before. So there was my Friday last week.
Saturday I vaulted. I was feeling pretty good, definitely tired, but really wanted to jump well. It was a really really big meet that we were at and there were 36 girl vaulters. Thats a lot. That is a lot of people to have warm up and vault. It takes a really long time. Because there were so many girls, and because I skipped the first couple heights (you can decide when you want to come in) I had a while to wait. The whole waiting game is hard. Again, like the night before, I kept having to warm up. Once I started vaulting, there were many times that I had 30-40 minutes in between my jumps. That meant that I had to sit down and wait, and then warm up again. Every time I warmed up I just kept getting nervous about the amount of energy I was using. I just knew I didn't have a lot. My whole body hurt. And I was beyond exhaustion. Needless to say, the meet didn't go as well as I had hoped. I cleared 11'4, which isn't terrible, but didn't get 11'10 like I had the meet before and didn't even have the opportunity to jump at 12'4 which is what I was hoping to clear. My last three vaults I literally had to tell myself to put every ounce of energy I had into it. I had nothing left. I actually ended up calling my mom on my drive back because I didn't want to fall asleep, and this was like 4 in the afternoon. My body had just had enough.
So I then headed back to the pool to cheer for the final night session. Conference is such a long meet! Well... the Lady Knights came out victorious! We got first for the 6th year in a row! We're trying to break the record for consecutive wins...our rivals have it at 10...so we're working towards at least 11. Hopefully we'll see that day come in the future. It is exciting to be on such a good team. I don't know what it is like to not win Conference. Actually in either sport. It was a fun and good meet, but too long if you ask me. I was utterly exhausted by the end.
Sorry for my sports ranting. It is such a huge part of my life right now. Sorry if I am being really boring...
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