Swimming

When I was a kid, I used to love playing around in the pool all of the time during the summer. In 7th grade, I figured I'd join the swim team because I enjoyed playing around in the pool. I had to try out. I only made 1 of the 3 try outs because I went to Disney World during two of them. I still made the team. Swim practices were nothing like playing around in the pool. I had to swim lots of yards. I tried out in 8th grade, showed up at every try out, and didn't make the team. Strange. I swam all 4 years in high school because there were no try outs. I definitely was not the fastest swimmer. For whatever reason, I never kicked my feet much. When my younger brother was in 6th grade, he brought home a flyer about swimming in a club. That changed my life. I started swimming all year round and lost a ton of weight. Swimming is one of the best exercises you can do. It was awesome, I was dropping pounds like crazy while eating more than usual! How could it get any better than that? I never liked swim practices. Swimming back and forth for two hours is ridiculously boring. You have no one to talk to besides yourself. The competition was always fun. I never worried about what place I finished in a race. My only goal was to lower my time each race. However, if someone was close to me at the end of the race, more than likely, I will beat them. I like the pride of getting 5th instead of 6th. For whatever reason, my coach thought it would be a good idea for me to swim the 500 yard freestyle all of the time. I will never understand why he wanted one of the slowest swimmers on the team to swim the longest race. I was so slow that every other swimmer was done and waiting for me to finish. My team would start the slow clap until I finished the race. Yup, that was me, swimming in to the slow clap! In my last home meet as a senior, I swam the 500 as always. I had never qualified for sectionals. To qualify for sectionals, you have to swim a certain time. Sectionals is a meet where you swim against many other people that qualified. The fastest swimmer in sectionals goes to states. In that race, I was close to two people that were luckily next to me on both sides. I kicked and thrashed my way home and beat both of them. Sectional qualifying time for the 500 was 6:05.00. My time was 6:04.18. The other two guys' times were 6:04.71 and 6:04.78. I just out touched them. Although I made sectionals, I didn't get to go because I was in Germany during the sectional meet. It sucked to miss it, but I knew I wouldn't do well because I barely qualified. Either way, it was a great moment in my swimming career. I swam in college too. College never had try outs either. I was in a division 3 school, not division 1. I only swam 3 of the 4 years because student teaching my senior year conflicted with swim practices. I wish I swam my last year. Oh well. In college, I swam the 500 and the 1000! On the few times that the swim meets had this race, I swam the 1650, a one mile race! I'll never forget my first 1650 ever. There were only 4 of us. One guy lapped me two times, which means he was 100 yards ahead of me. I shockingly lapped someone else twice. The other guy was about half a pool length ahead of me most of the race. On the last lap, I caught up to him and was able to beat him out and finish second. Not bad for my first 1650 ever. I don't miss the 6,000+ yard practices 6 days a week and lifting weights 3-4 days a week. I also don't miss the long bus rides home from college meets. I definitely miss the competition, though. If I didn't swim, I know for a fact that I would weigh much, much more than I do now. I guess joining the swim team in high school and college and swimming all year round was worth it.