Friday 31 January 2014

Some Interesting Reads

While we are experiencing some great warmths up here, (around 0c) the lower 48 are having the real Alaskan winter.

Snow Storm In US South

Also I found a funny blog written by an American in New Zealand:

www.youngadventuress.com

I didn't realise they don't have feijoas. And trying to explain one is tricky. As I am writing this on one of the school computers apparently Zealand isn't a word... who knew.


Tuesday 28 January 2014

I met an Olympian


Peter vanderkaay. Swam for the Universoty of Michigan. Won gold in Athens and Beijing in relays and individual bronzes in Beijing and London for middle distance free events.
He was up for the 'Great Alaska Open' swim meet. A small meet (30 girls in the 100 free) but used to get times for JOs ( the big state meet of the year). It isn't a popular meet because it is short course metres. Since when do Americans swim Scm?
He was a really nice guy once I finally managed to hunt down a pass to get on the pool deck.


Monday 27 January 2014

Cal Baptist

Over the weekend we had our final home meets for the season. The girls from Califorina Baptist came up. Its cute when the californian teams come up because unless your from Alaska or somehwere snowy, you dont know uggs are not a good footwear choice. On the morning of day two one of the girls slipped and busted up her knee. Lesson learnt the hard way!
Anyway, it was not a good outcome for the Nanooks. While the other team was shaved and tapered (wearing proper racing togs and well rested for racing) we are in the midst of some tough training. Many pool records fell, mostly to Cal. Although in a few races both Alaska and Cal baptist went under the old record.
I had a pretty full schedule three races both days. day one 500,200 and 800 fr relay. Day two 1650, 500 and 200 fr relay. I came out with a few second places and a win in the 800 relay.
The real test comes in Feb when we head down to LA again for conference champs.  

Friday 24 January 2014

When rain is a bad thing

It has been unusually warm since we got back from California, so warm it even rained today. But rain is bad news. Everything turns to ice and it is super slippery. Classes even got cancelled because of the rain! The roads are dangerous and so people were advised to stay home. They put extra gravel on the paths but classes might still be cancelled tomorrow. If I cant have a snow day, may as well have a rain day.

Sunday 19 January 2014

Polar Vortex

While everyone else was freaking out a few weeks ago about the polar vortex, may alaskans were being blamed for it. Places like chicago and reached negatve 40 which is very uncharacteristic. Alaskans that went to other places for xmas were blamed by their family members for bringing the cold with them. So while the rest of the country is worried about alaskan like temperatures we areexperiencing  some warmth (relative warmth of course).

http://nation.time.com/2014/01/17/the-polar-vortex-is-probably-coming-back/

And they think theres another one coming! Oh no.

Friday 17 January 2014

Back to school

We got back into Ak late on Tuesday night. I saw this at Lax before we left.


Also at Lax was a vending machine with ipods, tablets, cellphones and headphones. Ridiculously overpriced of course.


Flew over some moutains. one of them should be mount rainer, not sure which one though. Its the largest mountan in the 'continental US' they aint got nothing on Alaska.



Back to school and back to the grind. The first class was today (thursday) and our next meet is next weekend.





Monday 13 January 2014

Training Trip

To sum up it was a pretty good few weeks in the sun. We got to train outside and hang out on the beach. I have been comparing the weather here to the weather back in Ak and NZ. It has been down around negative 30 in Ak and around the same temp as NZ ( which i would like to add is in summer and here it is winter).


It was a good change to cook your own food, dorm food can be a bit of a drag. And I got to catch up with some of my cousins that came to watch a meet- they brought friends so I had my own cheer squad.

We have been fortunate enough to have some great hospitality from the LMU swim team. They let us train in their pool. They had a team competition going on and each team cooked us dinner one night. The winning team cooked a good steak and put on plenty of dessert. They let us travel in their bus and the girls were really friendly and funny.


Cant say I got much of a tan in this califorina sun though. Im still a bit hesiatant after being burnt in 10minutes  by New Zealand sun. On the last day we drove down to La Jolla beach, if I ever feel like dropping $1.8 mill on a house it would be a really nice place to live!




Bakersfield

The third and final meet of this training trip was the CSU Bakersfield. It was against some very good schools. Two of them were DIV 1 (Bakersfield and LMU) and the other was San Diego one of the best Div 2 schools in the nation. You could tell it was the end of the training trip by everyone's times, but it was good to see how we stack up against some tough competition.



It kind of felt like swimming in a prison though. The pool is located in the middle of a field and they are going through a drought to there is dead grass. There is also barb wire around the fence. kind of creepy...


Get amongst it

Theres always stuff happening in a city. A few mornings ago we had a wee detour on the way to morning practice because there was a hit and run at 4.15 that morning. It was right outside the gate to the university where we train so we had to drive around for like 20 minutes trying to find a way in.

The other thing was the skywriting. Just a few hours earlier the star in the Transformer movies Shia Labeouf had announced his retirement in a tweet and hash tagged the phrase Stop creating. There were planes right above us at the beach spelling out in the sky #stopcreating



Like I said, Theres always stuff happening in a city.

Relay Meet

The second meet of the trip was a relay only meet. We were competing against LMU and Pepperdine in no individual events, just relays. The NCAA format we swum had 9 events including the usual 400 medley (1 person swims 100 back the next swims brs etc) and 800 free (each swims 200 free). But there were some different ones including 3x100 fly, a 500 free (first swimmer swims 50, the next swims 100, then 150 then 200) and another 400 medley but each person swims a 100 I.M. As a team we won 3/9 events which wasn't enough to come away with a win. It was fun when we did a combined relay at the end with two girls from each of the three teams.

Tuesday 7 January 2014

Monday 6 January 2014

Quad Meet

First meet back of the season and the Nanooks bring home the W. It counts as three wins because we raced and beat three other teams (fresno pacific, biola and pomona pitzer colleges). We are now 5-2 for the season. It was good to swim outdoors again, but the pool used salt instead of cholrine. And unlike in New Zealand everyone seems to be getting a tan, not sunburnt. Not me, I'm still white as a ghost.



As a team we had 7 indiviudal wins and some top three relay finishes. I won the 500 and was second in the 1000 free. 

On wednesday we are racing in a relay only meet. Its againest pepperdine and LMU who we have trained alongside a few times this week. 

Till then I'm going to soak up some rays while I can.







Thursday 2 January 2014

2014


A beautiful first day of the year here. We had training in the morning and then walked down to the Santa Monica pier in the afternoon.




A nice walk down the board walk of Venice beach.





Wednesday 1 January 2014

Made it to So cal

Or Southern California for those of you not familiar with local lingo. Flying from SF to LA is kind of an Auckland to PN flight, up then back down.


LA is a big place, here is an example.


We are staying at some little condos about 200m from a beach. I wonder if there will be anything to do in between trainings? Hmmmm

This is the pool we're training in. Outside and 25y by 50m. Rumour is we get to train long course later in the week. I'm pretty excited for that!