Swim Camp

After a very long, but fortunately uneventful, trip,  I arrived in Abbeville. I was picked up from the station by two camp staff, and from there we went to a school cafeteria. Then from there, the older kids (there were thirteen of us) went to see our rooms, which were in a building behind the pool.
Then we went to the pool, which was absolutely beautiful, and well laid out. It had a main reception area and a small workout room on the ground level, and to get to the pool you had to go downstairs.

Once you were downstairs, you had to take off your shoes almost straight away and go through the hallways to get to the six changing rooms. The changing rooms aren't done by gender, but by number; the boys would go into six and the girls would go into seven. Then to get to the pool, you would go past the showers and through a wide shallow foot pool. Then they had several different basins: one was like a small artificial beach, for the very little kids; one was a twenty-five-meter pool; one was a fifty-meter pool; and one was a diving pool, which was about twelve meters across and quite deep.

We had our first practice, which was really about getting to see how good different people were, and went to dinner: pizza. Then we all went up to a room in the school with a painfully green floor and we introduced ourselves. It was funny to see how the adults were far more interested in how I had gotten there and what it was like back home than the kids were. Then after some icebreaker games, we went to bed.

The next day, we had our first real practice in the morning. Then we studied theory of swimming, particularly focusing on Michael Phelps's butterfly. It's actually rather grotesque in slow motion. In the afternoon, we had a three hour long practice, after which we went to the gym. Some people played basketball, and everyone else curled up on workout mats and went to sleep. Tuesday followed, and we did more or less the same things, but the afternoon practice wasn't nearly as long.

Wednesday, we had quite the outing! In the morning, we had our usual practice; but in the afternoon, instead of a second practice, we went out. First, we went to do some archery; one of our instructors was a two-time world champion archer. We spent a couple of hours there, and then we went bowling. Evidently I'm terrible at bowling, because I only knocked down thirty pins; despite this, I wasn't the worst person there, because one girl only got twelve! On our way back from bowling, we met up with Sebastian Rouault, a French ex-Olympian swimmer. That evening, he spent well over an hour doing Q&A, only not aswering one question (whether or not he had a girlfriend). If I understood correctly, he now is a consultant, and plays water polo; he had trouble practicing swimming without a lot of questions on whether or not he was going back to swim competitively.

Thursday, we got to meet the man who organizes all of the coaches for the Olympics. He was rather old, and very hard to understand, but everybody immediately perked up when he said, "If you want to go to the Olympics…" and I understood much better when everyone was listening and there were no whispers in the background. During the afternoon practice, Jeremy Someone dropped by to say hello to Sebastian, and I felt very sorry for him. You see, he's a current competitive swimmer and rather good (I had never heard of him, but what do I know), so of course everybody wanted to take selfies with him and get his signature. In the meantime, all he had wanted to do was drop by and say hello to a friend.

After dinner, we went out to the nine o'clock viewing of "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation," and I even understood the drift of it. I'm sure I missed a lot of the jokes, but that's okay. We finally got to bed at about eleven thirty, completely worn out.

Friday morning, we had our usual practice, and then time to pack up. The older kids went to the gym and practiced a dance that one of the counsellors had suggested as a form of thanks for our coaches. In the afternoon, we had another practice, and in the evening, we had a party. The party was rather sad for me, because I saw some of the dirtiest dance moves I've ever seen coming from eleven and twelve year olds. And for those of you who don't know, seeing big, tall, muscular guys do a dance intended for girls is one of the funniest things you can see. Especially if they are leading said dance.

The last day, we had a swim meet. I was part of a relay, in which I did 50 m freestyle; I did 50 m fly and something else, either 100 m freestyle or 100 m IM. I don't remember. I had to leave right after the fly to get changed. After I got changed, they organised another relay, this time including the coaches and Sebastian; unfortunately, I had to leave for the train station about 30 seconds before I got to see Sebastian swim, which I would have liked to see. I guess you can't have everything.
I managed to get to Marseilles uneventfully, despite having to change stations in Paris.
Anyway, that was my fun for the end of the summer.

Ciao,
Florence