Fire Hazard

This weekend I am in Houston, Texas for my teams conference championship meet. I must say it is so nice to be so close to Austin. Last year the meet was in Tennessee. You would also think that since we are only traveling a mere 3 hours that nothing could go wrong...

I was woken up this morning by the fire alarm. I am rooming with our team trainer, Shawna. We completely disregarded it and I try to continue to sleep. It was 8am and about time for me to get up anyways so I did. I heard some commotion outside my room, but still payed no attention to it. I ignore commotions especially as a coach of college kids. Me and Shawna therefore continue to get ready, but the fire alarm keeps going off. I was rather annoyed by this so I decide to march down and complain to the front desk. When I opened the door the hallway was full of smoke. I calmly closed the door and turned to Shawna. I cursed and smiled and informed Shawna that our hotel was actually on fire. We then began to move a bit quicker, but still took our time to make sure we had all our valuable belongings. We figured if we saw flames we could easily out run them, or if need be we could jump out the window, we were only on the third floor. So I crammed my bag full of my precious things (mainly my mac) and headed out. At this point I thought of a talk i recently heard from Shari Dew. She spoke about a time when her hotel was on fire and she had to climb down 30ish flights of stairs and made the mistake of taking all her luggage with her which resulted in some severe knee injuries. I couldn't help but laugh at myself when I know I should just leave everything and run, but I of course took my dear sweet time and grabbed my precious computer among other things.

The smoke was incredibly thick and awful. I walked down the stairs and went outside to find multiple fire trucks and police surrounding the building. It turned out that one of the dryers in the laundry room on the first floor blew up. I broke out my camera, gathered my team and made them all pose in front of the trucks and make terrified faces. It was rather hilarious. I after all am making the end of year slide show, so I had to document the moment and make it memorable. After a little while we were told we could go back in quickly to grab extra things if we needed them, but not to breathe because there was carbon-dioxide in the air. At this point all my sprinters were telling me how thankful they were that I made them do so many breath control sets. They saw this as a challenge and totally went for it. I was so proud. I will upload pics when I get back.

Conference is going well, by the way. I am proud of my athletes and look forward to some more fast swimming.