Take your mark.......Go!

"Swimmers to the block", said the referee. I made my way onto the starting block with my adrenaline rushing and energy pumping through my body. I bent down in the diving position, awaiting the referee's command. "Take your mark......(and after what seems like eternity)BEEP!

The Water Is My Second Home

My hands shoot forward through the water with a fast splash. I can see the wall just a mere 5 meters away. This is it, the final last strokes that will determine my fate for a race. As my hands touch the wall, I look up at the scoreboard where I can be satisfied or not. This is what it feels like to be a swimmer.

In Sync

You’re underwater. You’re waiting. Waiting for the right count. The moment to boost out.

This is synchronized swimming. Never heard of it? I wouldn’t be surprised actually. Synchro is a sport in which members of a team of swimmers perform coordinated or identical movements in time to music. A routine is where you swim to music and have different choreography. Don’t even get me started on what we have to wear... You know what Jello is right? You’re supposed to eat it. We put it on our heads. It’s not colored though so you can’t tell but it looks weird.

The Start Of Swimming

The Start of Swimming

I started swimming when I was about 18 months old.  I swam at children of the sea, a program that helps kids learn the basics of all four strokes.  My first experience in the water was the mommy and me classes.  My mom tells me that I didn’t like to get in the water at first, but once I was in it, it was hard to get me out.  

Later when I was about 7 years young, I had an amazing instructor who I loved very much.  Her name was Claire.  She decided that being a swimming instructor wasn’t the job for her and decided to leave.  My mom tells me that when Claire left, I would loathe swim practice.  I would spend half of the practice time crying my eyes out on the side of the pool not wanting to get in.  My mom would have to come and calm me down, but 

I insisted that I would not get in unless Claire was there.  

I finally got over that Claire wasn’t coming back.  I continued with my lessons at Children of The Sea for a few years.  During the summer, I would participate in a swim team that was at our local health club.  Ever so often I go to the health club with my family to do certain activities and in the summer, we are sometimes there when the swim team is practicing.  Now, I wouldn’t even consider that a swim team, its more of a time to play, with a few laps of swimming sprinkled in.  This swim team was the birthplace of my swimming career.  

My mom enrolled me into the Tualatin Hills Swim Team when I turned nine.  I have been on the team ever since and I greatly thank her for signing me up for it.  It has filled my life with joy and I have found that if I am ever stressed or feeling depressed or angry, that I can go to practice and all of those feeling will go away.

Swimming teaches me new things about myself as well as life lessons everyday.  It has taught me to be disciplined.  If I want to get better I have to work on the little things like my underwaters and technique of the stroke instead of being able to be so big that I can just power myself through the water.  If I want to make those things a habit then I have to be disciplined about them. I have to do them every time an opportunity arrives.