I try not to tell too many of the “back in the day” type stories. They are lame, like dad jokes and overused emojis. I get it. I’ll make an exception today, because this one hit me last night.
I was doing some work with the Twins game on in the background. I’m a Twins fan, but not to the crazy level. I do like having a game on in the background though. The Twins went up 1-0, then 3-0, then were all of sudden down 3-6. They came back and won in the last inning 7-6.
For some reason last night, it brought back the memory of the Twins Set we would do every week in the summers. My coach, Tim Daly was a huge Twins fan and he’d have the game on the radio during night practices pretty much all the time.
The set went like this. The Twins would play every Wednesday night. If the Twins won, we would have to do “X” number of times 200s the next morning. “X” was the number of runs the Twins scored. If the Twins lost, we would combine the scores of the two teams and that’s how many times 200s we had to do Thursday morning.
The Twins were a good team back then, and most of the time we’d end up doing 4-5 200s, so totally manageable. Every now and then there would be a bad one though. What I remembered most was that the entire team would be listening intently to the game on Wednesday night practices. Kids that knew nothing about baseball nor cared about baseball were all of a sudden devout followers.
I can even remember on weekends, trying to figure out who would be pitching for the Twins on Wednesday with my teammates so we’d have a sense of the probability of how bad it could be.
The set itself was tough, but there were many that were tougher and many that were easier. What I love about the set is that it gave the team a common topic we could all bond around. That was the most powerful part.
So sitting here last night, as the Twins were losing 6-5, me typing away, the thought crept into my mind “Man..11 200s, practice is gonna be rough”. Funny the things you remember from your time in swimming.