On Saturday afternoon I arrived at school for 15:30 to wait for my team of 4 girls who had made it to the Regional heats / finals for the Primary Swimming Gala.
We (they!) had won the County Finals' Freestyle Relay earlier in April and were pumped by the result. (More so because the boys hadn't won their relays!)
They duly arrived for 16:00 and a minibus picked us up and drove us from Chichester to Guildford.
We arrived in good time for the 18:00 start - which lapsed a lot as many other schools were tardy. This happens.
After the boys had all had some warm up time, our girls swam some lengths to warm themselves up. They were nervous as they were swimming with the fastest girls; they qualified 9 seconds quicker than us. In fact, of the 16 schools present in our event, we were only quicker than the team who were second in our county.
We cheered on another school - usually our rivals when swimming but they were here as a "small school" and we weren't competing directly against them.
The girls (and I and their parents and brothers who were in attendance) sat through 13 races and presentations for the top "Medley" races before their heat.
They swam well.
By my stopwatch they took a second off their qualifying time, but were still 8th in their heat. Out of 8. 1min 11.3 seconds.
Except we were then DQ'd for a reason we didn't choose to investigate, which seems doubly cruel.
We cheered on our rivals in their last heats and finals before changing and heading back to school.
Once the children had safely all gone, I locked up and got home for 22:30.
7 hours for 1minute 11.3seconds of swimming!
Worth it as the children behaved amazingly, cheered on rivals until we were hoarse, were upbeat throughout and got to swim at a level higher than they'd ever dreamt possible.
My question for tonight is: would you have done it?