SOCIAL KICK EXTREME!

We just had one of the strangest morning practices we have ever had.  It all started the night before.  We were in the middle of a zone 3 set, which is pretty much VO2 max for 20x 100 in the long course pool.  I was trying to make a deal with the kids.  If you can impress me by hitting your goal paces the rest of the way through the set we will have a recovery workout in the morning.


“Yay!”  the team cheered.

“We’ll even do lots of kick.”  I elaborated.

“Ugh!  No!  That‘s not fair!”  They exclaimed, looking down pathetically at the water as though I had told them I was kidding about the recovery day and then kicked them in the gut just to make sure they heard me.

“What?”  I asked.  “What’s wrong with kick?  It will give your shoulders a break.”

“We never do easy kick!  You always tell us that easy kick is a waste of time so all the kick we do is super hard!  That is not a recovery practice!”

Hmph… they were actually listening when I said that part.  Go figure.

“Can we do social kick?”  they asked.

Oh great, I thought.  It’s been years.  I hoped they had forgotten about the whole social kick thing we did once when they were all 8 and unders. I don’t know where I got that dumb idea, but I guarantee you they don’t remember a single word of anything else they did in their first 5 years of swim practices.  Apparently the legend has been passed on from year to year, kept alive just enough to never have disappeared into swim mythological obscurity.

So in sarcasm I stupidly said, “Sure, why not?  Let’s all just bring cups and saucers and rest them on our kickboards and make a stinkin’ tea party out of it.”

So that’s what they did.  They spent the entire cool down cooking up a plot to brew tea and bring muffins to practice so that they could enjoy the one easy kick set I was going to allow them to have ever.  They were gonna enjoy it to the extreme.

…as a matter of fact, in case you can’t hear it well enough in the video below, the three girls who hate kickboards the most stayed up late to watch Harry Potter so they could brush up on their English accents.  You know… to make it like an authentic 800-yards-worth-of-wasting-your-time English tea party.

Ugh.  That’ll teach me to open my big mouth.