The first challenge of the day was to get somehow to Nieuwegein, Utrecht's suburb about 10 km from my place. In this god forsaken place lives a friend of mine who offered me a car pooling to the place of competition (Eindhoven is about 70km from Utrecht).
I decided to get there by tram, but as it was sunday morning, there were no such things as trams in the streets. I realized it too late - namely at the exact moment I got to the tram station and saw the tramlist. After a series of extremely nasty curses about the Dutch-sunday-phenomena and few quick (and very stressful) phonecalls I was back on my bike, rushing with two bags and monofin on my back in the direction of that bloody Nieuwegein. Surprisingly, it was not raining, but at least it was freezing cold. Somehow I managed not to loose my direction and arrived to the place just on time. Stressed, tired and frozen as an icicle I got into the car and we set off for the big thing. Great start of the day in which you should be calm and concentrated as never....
The pool complex in Eindhoven is just extreme - biggest in Europe. Huge as nothing I have seen so far. In one big hall, there's a 50m pool, 25m pool with the diving tower and another narrower 50 m pool aside of all that. Crazy...
And we had this pools just for ourselves...neat :) From the first sight of the athlete list, I knew this competition will be badass. The names were just speaking for themselves - Stig Aavall Severinsen (DK national champion, former WR holder), Guillame Nery (constant weight WR holder - 113m), or my trainng fellow Eric van Riet Paap (NL national champ, good guy :) and many more...
Guillame Nery in his official "Guillame Nery jersey" :)
Statics started quite early and one of the first athletes gave it a big shot and made 8 minutes dive. Holy s***!! :) As for me, firstly I was doing a buddy for a friend of mine, and I've realized that the water will almost surely kill me - it was so damn cold and my neoprene was just short sleeve... My concerns were fulfilled almost perfectly. During my heating up, I was rather heating down... my teeth started to chatter and I could not concentrate myself. Therefore I holded only for 5:30 and moreover, I made a mistake during the official protocol and the time was not counted into the results. Well, guess I will write to Sinterklaas (=Mikuláš/ježíšek) for an overal neoprene set...
The rest of the statics was quite interesting. There were many blackouts (about 5), but most of them relatively light and there were also quite serious achievements (bunch of nationals was broken, some 7 minute dives and that one 8 minute ridiculousity). But the real fun was just about to begin... dynamics in 50 m pool were promising quite a competition.
But about these I will write next time... I am a bit sleepy today ;-)
1 comment:
jak to tedy na konec dopadlo?
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