Homeschool swimming day

Our Auckland homeschool swimming championships are happening in ten days time (on the 20th of March).

Registrations are open for another few days -- click the link above if you want to be involved.

Our homeschool athletics day, which I mostly organised, went so well that I've kind of been put into the organising team for the swimming day, too.  Not that I know much about swimming -- most of what I've learnt about swimming has been from watching Mulan and Miya's lessons over the past few years.

My attitude, though, is that something is better than nothing for the kids, and let's just get them into the pool for some fun, but competitive, races together.

In addition to this, Sandra, who is the main organiser of the swimming day, contacted the organisers of the local inter-school swimming competitions, with the aim of getting a homeschool team competing at the inter-schools.

The Primary School organisers got back to Sandra, and welcomed us to enter a homeschool team.  They have been very supportive of the idea.  Based on our homeschool swimming day results, we'll choose a team of 7 to 11-year-olds to compete in the North Shore inter-school competition on the 2nd of April.  If Miya does well at the homeschool day, she'll also swim at the inter-schools in the 8 years and under age group.  Mulan, sadly, turns 12 just a week before the age cut-off date.

The Intermediate School and Secondary School organisers have been less welcoming.  In fact, from what I hear they haven't even bothered to get back to Sandra about this.  Sigh!

Mulan and Miya have never properly raced before, and up to now they hadn't even specifically swum any of the race distances.  So we went to the Takapuna public pools on Friday with the aim of them trying out a few distances to see how they feel.  Because they were swimming in the public lanes, they occasionally had to zig-zag a bit and couldn't do ideal turns.  Nonetheless, in the hour we were there they both gained a better sense of the race distances.

Out of interest, I timed them as they each individually tried out a few distances.  They did:

Mulan:
100m freestyle: 1 min 54 sec
100m backstroke: 2 min 26 sec
100m breaststroke: 2 min 17 sec
33.3m butterfly: 54 seconds
33.3m freestyle: 27 seconds

Miya:
33.3m butterfly: 2 min 8 sec
100m freestyle: 2 min 53 sec
100m backstroke: 3 min 31 sec
100m breaststroke: 3 min 33 sec
33.3m freestyle: 43 sec

Just for fun, we came across the Auckland Swimming website, where we found the results of the recent Auckland junior championships.  Unsurprisingly, the girls have still got a way to go!  And amusingly, there is another Mulan in the 11-year-olds who is doing extremely well.