Blog 6

Today, I went to the pool for my morning practice and then spent the rest of the day to finding data for my research. What I was looking for was the results from the Swimming Summer National Championships and the Swimming Spring Nationals Championships from the past five years. These two swimming competitions happen every year and are the two of the most important competitions at the Canadian National Level. Usually, the competition in the spring is faster than the one in the summer, because during summer the best athletes in Canada are competing around the world at international competitions such as Olympics or the Worlds Championships. The results from these competitions will allow me to see how well the swim clubs in Quebec are performing at the national level: a high performance level. In those results, I will determine how many finals (top 8 or top 10 depending on the year) the swim club will make at each competition and how many medals they win. Then, I can compare the swim clubs within each other; see if they are steady over the years and if they are improving or decreasing. I thought it would be very easy to find the data because it is all available on swimming.ca. Unfortunately, it was very long to assemble all the data because, even though they are all on swimming.ca, they were not organized in a way that was easy to find. I had to find every national competition over the past 5 years (10 of them), then find every swim club from the province of Quebec who were present at the competition, then identify each swimmer individually and, finally, look at every position that the swimmers finished in. This whole process took over 4 hours, but it was important for my research to have this data, so I’m happy with the results. While I was doing this, something unusual happened at the pool. The roof caught on fire due to construction work. Fortunately, the fire was kept under control and nobody was hurt. As a safety precaution, everybody at the pool had to be evacuated and all activity in the pool had to stop. The firefighters took care of the fire and everybody was able to return to their training or activities. Here are a picture of kids and swimmers who got evacuated and waiting outside: