The iPhone 5

The iPhone 5. "It's the thinnest, fastest, lightest iPhone ever."

That's what they always say. Which doesn't mean I'm disappointed in the product, it just means that I'm not amazed or surprised. I got one for my 16th birthday, and I love it. Going from a $10 Target pay-by-the month phone that barely did anything to an iPhone 5 that does virtually everything, is a huge leap forward for me.

Most people already know that it has an 8-megapixel camera with flash as well as a pretty decent front-facing camera for video chatting. They also have probably heard that the new "EarPods" that come in the box are much better quality than Apple's previous attempts at making headphones. However, there are a few things about these EarPods that you may not have known. The small little remote on the right EarPod looks deceptively simple. People normally assume that it only has a built in mic and can be used to turn the volume up or down. However, the space in between the + and - buttons is actually a button in itself                                                that has a multitude of functions:

1. One click: pause/play
2. Long press: activates Siri
3. Double click: skips to the next song
4. Triple click: goes back to the previous song
5. Double click and hold: fast-forward
6. Triple-click and hold: rewind

The smartphone is amazingly fast, and the multitude of apps that you can get in the App Store is astonishing. You can do anything from reading books and playing games to watching TV and doing work on it. It is truly a phenomenon in the age of technology.

Sectionals

Sectionals. They started on my birthday. Which meant that I would technically be 15 for a few extra days. It would be my last meet as a 15-year-old.

It started on Thursday, December 13, and I was exhausted from the action-packed 3-day meet that I mentioned in my post previous post: Las Vegas!!!. Katelyn and I had made it for a couple individuals, and Jordan and Makenna would join us for the relays on Saturday and Sunday. This meet, held at the Belmont Olympic Pool in Long Beach, CA, was decidedly more professional and businesslike than any meet I had ever been to. All of the swimmers who qualified for sectionals were insanely fast, many of them just coming back from Junior Nationals the week before.

Before my first race, the 100 free, I was sitting up at the bleachers and caught sight of people's bag tags on their backpacks. Many of them read 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials, or 2012 North American Cup Challenge - huge meets that indicated that the people here were extremely talented, and some of the best in the nation. I was in a pond with some pretty big fish. This wasn't your regular age group meet, this was a senior meet, where everyone was competing against everyone, and age wasn't a factor. I saw people as young as 12, and people past college-age competing. By the end of the meet I was completely exhausted from the two demanding back-to-back meets.

I went from being at the top of the meet to being somewhere in the middle of these incredibly speedy people of all ages from California and Nevada. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience. I was swimming with people who will definitely be swimmers to watch at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. I realized that for these people it wasn't just about the fun and games, but that the people in this meet were in the "Big Leagues." These are people who were breaking National Age Group Records, and I was extremely humbled. It was amazing and extremely inspiring that I got the chance to compete in the same meet as them.

Las Vegas!!!!

"Real athletes swim. The rest just play games."

After months of intense training, the moment finally arrived. We were going to Las Vegas for our Winter Age Group Championship Meet. It's a 3-day meet that's usually right before or around the same time as my birthday. The crazy anticipation was tangible in all of us in the week leading up to the meet. This was the very first out-of-state meet that I was going to attend, and I was beyond excited.

Despite being indoors, the pool felt really fast, and Thursday night when we were warming up, they were playing Christmas music through underwater speakers so that all of the swimmers could hear it.

From the moment I swam my first race, I knew that all of my hard work had finally paid off. To the surprise of the entire team, I won gold in the 100 free finals the very first night of the meet, and then found out that I broke the meet record. That was the very first time I had ever won a gold medal at such a big meet, and I was one of the youngest people in my age group. Even my hard-to-please Russian coach smiled and actually said, "Good job!" It was only the second time I had ever heard him say that to anyone in my life.

Our Team Logo

The rest of the meet went just as well. Jordan Stead, Katelyn Farrow, Makenna DuBois, and I were in every single relay and we medaled in 3 out of the 4 relays despite being seeded much lower. We would come back from behind even though we were swimming in the outer lanes, while the inner lanes are the ones predicted to win. I had to anchor (go last) in all four of the relays.
The highlight of the relays was the 200 Medley relay in which we got the gold.

Then, to close out the the weekend, I swam the 200 free and 50 free in finals, Sunday night, medaling in both, and getting another gold medal to add to my collection from the crazy sprint: the 50 free.

Since our team (OC Riptide Aquatics) is only a year and a half old, the performance of all of our swimmers made a splash in Vegas. We created a name for our team, and established it as a force to be reckoned with in the midst of many well-known, esteemed teams.

At the end of the meet, Katelyn and I found out we qualified for sectionals (an even higher meet) in some of our individuals, and that our relays had qualified too. All four of us were going to have to race again, within the next week.

A Science to Sleeping?

App Store Icon

Sleep is the key to success. If you get enough sleep, you perform better, in all aspects of life including sports and school.

Last summer, my friend told me about a sleep cycle alarm app. She said it woke you up at the time when you'd feel the most rested. I decided to give it a try. The app was only $1, and it turned out to be one of the best $1 investments of my life.

The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock by Maciek Drejak Labs ingeniously calculates the optimal time for you to wake up. By putting in the time you need to wake up by, the app creates a half an hour time slot for when it will wake you up. It wakes you up in your lightest sleep phase, when you're closest to being awake. At first I was a bit skeptical. Could it be a fluke? Could it really be possible for this $1 app to accurately map out your sleep cycles? Weren't applications/software like that usually extremely expensive? Yet, as I read the reviews, tens of thousands of people were extremely satisfied with it.

Recommended Placement

When I finally downloaded it, the app immediately caught my attention. I put it under my mattress cover, like it instructed me to, and went to sleep. Not expecting much the first night (because it takes 5 days to calibrate), I surprisingly woke up at a time when I actually felt good, and not extremely groggy from the previous night's sleep.

As I continued using it, the app became more and more astonishing. Not only did it show you a graph showing your sleep movement, but it gave you a percentage of sleep quality. Depending on the calmness and length of time you slept, you would have a different sleep quality ranging from 0%-100%. It would also generate other graphs that showed what things affected your sleep quality and averages for the amount of time you spend in bed as well as what time you go to bed.

I would highly recommend this app to people who feel like smashing their alarm clock to bits when they wake up in the morning, as well as anyone else looking for an exemplary alarm clock.

Here is the link to download the app in the App Store/iTunes (it's currently only available on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad): https://itunes.apple.com/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320606217

7 Things That Make Swimmers Happy

All these things make a swimmer smile :)

1. Food
2. Tapering
3. Warm down
4. Lightning
5. Dropping time
6. Relays
7. No morning practice!

Food. 

The great thing about swimming is that you work out so much that you can eat everything and anything you want. After an especially hard practice, swimmers are often starving, so any food that they can shovel into their mouth is welcome. Any kind of food makes a swimmer happy after practice.

Tapering.

Tapering makes any athlete happy. Following those intense months of excruciating training, your big meet is in a couple of weeks, and the taper begins. For the non-athletes out there, tapering is what swimmers do after a long period of intense workouts. You dramatically reduce the amount you swim, and since your muscles are conditioned for long, hard workouts, it provides your body with tons of energy and puts you in prime condition for the huge competition coming up. Your body is just itching to work harder, so when the time comes, you can release all of your pent up energy, and you usually drop time. Although we never taper for that long, it comes as a joy to swimmers because it means easy workouts!

Warm down.

Whenever I hear those words, my face breaks out into a huge grin. Warm down means the workout is virtually over, and it's time to relax. It's the time when you can ease your aching muscles and cool off and move as slowly as you want to.

Lightning.
Lightning = no practice! Anything indicating no practice brings happiness to a swimmer. To read more on why lightning is so amazing, read my previous post Lightning: A Swimmer's Friend.

Dropping time. 
There's no greater satisfaction for a swimmer than dropping time. After the countless hours of hard work, dropping time makes it all worth it. The blood, sweat, and tears - all of it finally pays off.

Relays!!!
Relays are the best. Swimming generally isn't a team sport, except when it comes to relays. You're depending on 3 other people, and it makes swimming so much more fun. Everyone always swims their fastest in a relay and we just get so much more competitive!

No morning practice.
Only swimmers get excited when they find out they only have one practice, instead of two. It totally makes my day every time I hear my coach speak those words.

Swimming With the Stars

Southern California is known for breeding outstanding swimmers. That's why it has the toughest competition. When you're swimming among and against a lot of Olympic caliber athletes, it's really hard to shine. Sure, you might be the fastest girl on your team, but in the grand scheme of things, you might not even be in the top 10% in Southern California. While you may not be in the top 10% in SoCal, if you just drive 6 hours north, you might be in the top 2% of the entire region. Like I said, Southern California has the toughest competition.

The last two swim meets I swam in, I had the chance to compete with some prodigies that went to the Olympic Trials this year who ranged from ages 14-16. That means that they're about the same age as me! As you can probably imagine, it was extremely intimidating swimming against these girls. But at the same time it was an amazing experience, and it pushed me to go faster than ever before. I thought to myself, "If these girls can make it to the Olympic Trials, why can't I?"

It's crazy to think that people my age are actually making it to the Olympic Trials and competed with major celebrities in the swimming world like Missy Franklin, Natalie Coughlin, Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, etc. Even if they didn't make it to the Olympics, they're still super young, and have a bright future ahead of them, the possibility of them making it to the Olympics in 4 years is something attainable. I'm glad that I live in Southern California, because it gives me the chance to swim with a huge pool of astonishing talent, an experience that I would be able to get in very few places around the world.

A Note on Classics: Pride and Prejudice

I know that this blog is supposed to be about swim stuff, but occasionally I'll put in a thing or two about books that I've read recently. I felt that it was absolutely necessary for me to post something about this.

Whenever I pick up a classic to read, I already have a negative view toward the book. I don't know what it is about classics, but for some reason I am always reluctant to read it. So naturally when I downloaded Pride and Prejudice onto my Kindle (because it was free) as my SSR book, I was not particularly looking forward to it.

I generally keep an open mind, when reading books, but when I have to read classics, my brain automatically goes into "classic mode," and I prepare to be bored out of my mind. Although I generally end up liking most of the classics I read, the bias against them seems to be hardwired into my consciousness, without any real cause. I subconsciously negatively judge the book before I even start reading it; just because it's a classic.

Now that I've made my prejudice clear on the subject of classics, I found myself inexplicably drawn into the world of Pride and Prejudice. This completely caught me by surprise, because although I usually like the classics I read, they don't pique my interest until the very end. This book, however, was different. Despite the fact that this book is considered a romance novel, it was probably the most non-romancy romance novel I have ever read (by contemporary standards). I actually thoroughly enjoyed reading it - and I am typically not a romance fan. It wasn't your typical boy-meets-girl-and-they-fall-in-love romance, but a more intellectual romance that did not follow the traditional storyline. The complexity and multi-facetedness of the two main characters made for it to be a completely new type of book that I had never encountered before. For the first time, I couldn't wait until I could get back to reading the book - an irresistible urge that I normally have for other, non-classic books, but have never had for a classic. It was incredible. This book was ingenious and some of the characters' silliness made me laugh out loud.

Although some of my friends claim that this book is terribly boring and impossible to finish, I beg to differ. If you give this book a chance, it can turn out into being an incredibly good read, and I highly recommend it. Jane Austen wrote wonders in this book, and it taught me an important lesson: Don't judge a book by its status as a classic.