We arrived home at four pm on Friday afternoon only to run straight to the pool for the swim meet that started at three pm. Luckily it was at our home pool and we didn’t have to go far, but that still didn’t help the fact that we hadn’t swum in over a week and I was puking my brains out the day before. I told my coach, Freddy, that I wasn’t feeling well and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to swim that day and if I do, don’t be disappointed.
His response was, well you should go eat a lot chocolate before your race and that will give you energy.
WHAT?! Are you kidding?... He was not. Despite my burst of laughter and response of “ok, if you want me to throw up again,” he insisted that chocolate is good for you before each race. It made sense now why they always handed out chocolate bars and gummi bears to the team during the competitions. However, I found it hard to believe that I had actually found someone (in fact a whole culture) who whole-heartedly idealizes the benefits of chocolate as much, if not- more, than Mary Beth. No, just kidding. Needless to say I did not eat anything before I swam, but seriously somebody needs to teach this country some proper pre-physical exercise eating habits!
However, I soon was informed of the proper pre-physical exercise eating habits by BG’s host mom. She informed me that it was actually 3 hours that you must refrain from entering the water after eating a meal. The reason for this, she said, was that your body can’t handle the physical activity and digestion processes at the same time and your insides will actually explode. I had to fight to keep myself from laughing but when she informed us that, “no, really it happened to a girl last week in a pool and she died!” It was at that point I could no longer contain it and was soon after rolling on the ground laughing.
It was almost as funny as the time that we found out why Dominicans believe cows can’t swim. It’s because when they try to swim they leave their tails up and forget to close their butts, thus… drowning through their buttholes. Haha! It is stories like these that make me stop and ponder the true complexities of cultural miscunderstandings.
SO, going back to my story of the swim meet, I decided to go for it even if it meant killing myself and swam the 100 breast Friday night to end up taking second place. I felt much better on Saturday and we were at the pool all day long from 8-3 and from 4-8 for the afternoon session. It was tiring, but I swam well and had some laughs sitting around with all the guys on the team. We had dinner at our program director’s house (our other mom’s house) Sat. night to reflect and wrap up our rural stay experience. After swimming all morning Sunday, I had qualified to go to Santo Domingo and swim in the Pan-American Championships in six out of the seven events I swam. I was surprised and pleased at how the meet went.
Sunday night we had a birthday party for Elaine and Marco’s two year old daughter Portia. It was a Halloween themed birthday party and I appeared as a pirate to help man (aahrr) the stations for all the dozen other two year olds that were running around. It was very fun and I ate far too many sweets.
To wrap up a good weekend, when I went to practice on Monday, Freddy congratulated me and informed me that I was the muchachos 18+ third place overall point scorer of the meet and I would receive a trophy! How crazy cool is that, and even crazier, I may be competing against a dozen other countries, including one team from New York. The funny thing is, if I can make it work with my schedule, I may be competing against my own country wearing the Dominican colors.
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