Important minutes and no limits

In this week I experienced so much new and awesome things. We had our first two swim meets and I had a school trip to Chicago. Our first meet of the season was against Jenison High School. It was like my first competition with the DLRG. I was so nervous and felt so weak before my first race. But after the start, when I thought of nothing, just than listen to the voice of the starter, everything got better. The last 25 were very strange, because I could almost feel the speed the lactic acid built up in my muscles. Sounds like a really strange thing, but I found it very fascinating. My times were 1:02 in the 100 free and a :27.25 in the 50 free. Faster than in the practices, but still not really fast. Finally we won the meet, although it was tighter, than Parks expected. Thursday we had a meet at Holland High School. They are a smaller High School, but are really fast. Parks was really excited, though, because we had weight room training on Monday and in consequence our muscles were sore and we couldn´t swim all out on Tuesday, but Thursday it was almost gone. It was supposed to be very tight and in the end we lost, but it was a great meet. I improved and had a 1:00.66 in my 100 free and a 0:58.77 after a relay start, which are supposed to be faster, but that´s still a significant difference. My 50 free were with a :26.09 better and I hope to improve a couple more seconds, which is not easy, but doable. Saturday we had the West Michigan Relays, which is a big meet with a lot of schools from West Michigan. I didn´t swim, because only the people from the A-Team got the opportunity, but I just cheered for us. We got first place in the overall ranking and had a few first places in races and broke at least one time record. Friday was a awesome and unforgetable day. I went with German learning students and other German exchange students from our school to Chicago. We started at 7am and came very tired back at 10:30pm. We visited the German Christkindl Market, in Downtown Chicago, which is surprisingly much German, and the Goethe Institute on Michigan Avenue, one of Chicago´s main streets. Of course we had plenty time to do christmas shopping and take lots of pictures. It was cold and really windy, but so clear, that the skyline picutres just look incredible. Before I went to the Big Meet we got our Christmas tree at a local tree farm. We cut it ourselves and went with the Hubbard´s. Finally I could add some pictures from my trip and the tree hunt. The link is: https://picasaweb.google.com/108204582564821266521/ExchangeYear201213?authkey=Gv1sRgCMiYt_DT6prcwgE