All my dreams are waking up

A line from a song keeps running through my head:
"Right now, All your dreams are waking up."

And they are. The Olympics are something I've been dreaming about for... what feels like forEVER. I've worked out for thousands and thousands of hours. A fellow gymnast-turned-diver friend of mine and I once tried to figure out how long we've spend upside down in our lives - I think it came out to more than a few months, total. I've literally worn holes in the bottoms of my feet from walking on too many diving boards.

But that's beside the point. I'm not knocking the journey - I love what diving has brought to my life, and wouldn't trade it for anything - but when I lay in bed at night, I don't picture myself at practice. I picture myself, in Beijing, on the far right three meter in the Water Cube, with so many faces watching me that they blur together. I hear the sounds of a thousand people trying to be quiet, and I smell the chlorine and hazey dustiness that I've come to associate with pools in China. I feel the rough spots on the balls of my feet when I walk down that board.

I've seen it in my mind so many times, and hopefully, soon, it's coming up for real. Very soon - Right now I feel like I'm juuust in the last moments of The Calm Before The Storm. I leave for Olympic Trials in four days. Then everything happens in a row - US Olympic Trials in Indianapolis... two weeks later, Trials, part 2, in Tenessee (I'll explain more about that later). In three weeks, I'll know whether I'm to be an Olympian or not. A few weeks after that I go to US Nationals in Pasedena. If I make the Olympic team, I'll leave straight from there for Beijing. Then it's a week of training in China, a week of competitions, and it's all over. Ten weeks from now, the Olympics will be over.

The time has come, and all my dreams are waking up. Every moment counts. I won't get these moments back.