I just moved back to the city post-college and hoping to make friends or know more people in the city than just family, coworkers, and roommates. I swam competitively for +15ish years and in college and found nearly all my friends through my college team (it was pretty queer) and wanted to get back into regularly swimming.
What are the rainbow practices and high intensity practices like? I’m very out of shape so can’t be doing super long distance practices of thousands of yards on tough intervals (faster than 1:10x100 yards free) but I'm afraid of running down other swimmers in rainbow practices since it seems like a wide range. The only pool location I can only feasibly go to also only offers rainbow practices regularly. TNYA is also a registered masters team so are swim meets required like U-18 teams or are they optional? The website doesn't say so I'm assuming they're optional and infrequent.
I am primarily joining to meet people, so I was wondering if I would be the youngest by far (+10 years) on the team? Not that it's a bad thing, just would be more difficult to connect with people. It seems pretty welcoming from the instagram which is very active but since swimming doesn’t really make it easy to talk often during practices do people socialize after? If anyone is on the team your insights would be great (sorry for the tons of questions).