Flashback: My swimming experience

Ok so I have been going to the gym lately and started swimming every other day. It is harder then I remember. So I figure for this blog post I will discuss the high and low of swimming from my past.

Well I was never the best swimmer or the worst; I was usually in the middle. Our team at Elmira Southside in New York was always losers, even though we had some excellent star swimmers. We had on average about 10 swimmers a year. If you ever seen a swim team, you'll know this is barely enough. When facing a star school like Horseheads High school we would get slaughtered by their second half of their team made up of freshman and sophomores. We would be sitting there on our benches when they come in and they would fill up all of our visitor benches and the area where we stored the kickboards. I would say about 40 swimmers. I remind you that’s half of their team!!


--So let the swimming begin--

When I said we had some excellent star swimmers, I wasn't lying. We had a fast sprinter, great butter flyers, and a great breast stroker, two great divers, and I wasn't to bad at being a back stroker myself.

The first race I believe was the 200 relays. (That’s 4 people doing 50m crawl). We would usually get 1st place. Being a small team sometimes that's all we could put in is one relay, so we would get 6 points for first. The other team would get 4 points for 2nd, 3 points for 3rd, 2 points for 4th = 9 points. Even though we got first we are now losing after the first race by 3 points. This happens every race, we slowly lose points and next thing we know we have a score like 40 SHS vs. 116 other team. (I don’t actually remember any actual score)

We would usually get first in the 200 relays, 200-medley relay, diving, 100-breast stroke, 100 fly, and 100 free.

I personally would usually get 2nd in 100 back.

--My swimming woes—

Any day that we had a swimming meet, I would get these terrible knots in my stomach from being nervous. The nervousness was not because of the swimming meet itself, but the idea that I might be swimming the 500m that day.

The 500 meters is a 20 lap race, which would get you so tire of almost drowning and your body would turn red with the heat generated from your body. The pool was usually around 75 degrees, very cold water, after swimming the 500 it would almost feel like a sauna.

I dreaded the 500-meter race not just this alone; usually afterward I would have to swim the next event. So I would have no energy left to swim the next race, which was a sprint. I just don’t remember what the event was.

--My event, the 100-meter backstroke—

I would either get 1st or 2nd in this event. This stroke just comes naturally for me. I would unfortunately be slow. My time was about 1 minute 14 seconds, which is slow compared to swimmers at state. State back strokers would usually get 59 seconds to 1 minute.

I always wonder if I lost 50 pounds if I would lose 14 seconds off my time.

Usually after the race I would feel like throwing up, never did though. I just believe we were never meant to swim on our backs.

--After the meets—

This was usually the best part; I would borrow $5 from either my mom or grandmother for the after meet feast. After an away meets that were far out of town usually 1-hour drives or more we would go to a place after the meet to eat. This was usually Wendy’s because they have the all you can eat salad bar.

-- Our mischief --

We sometimes did some weird and stupid things on these trips. One time we acted out our 200 freestyle relays on the Wendy’s carpet. We would fall to the floor and act like we were swimming do our flip turn, act like we were swimming and then the next person would jump on the floor acting like he dived in.

We also got in trouble when we broke a bus window and sprayed shaving cream all over the bus.

I once squeezed shampoo into another swimmer’s locker; I got into some real trouble on that one.

-- Swimming practice --

I and most of the other poor swimmers would never actually do the practice. We would be given something like 500 for our warm up in the beginning. Some others and I would just swim down and on our flip turn swim straight down to the bottom of the pool just to wait it out for a minute or two. Then swim back up and finish the 50 just to repeat this over again. I slacked often at practice until we get to the specialty swim practice.

We would be divided up into our special strokes and given our practice. This was the only time I didn’t mind doing the practice.

After swimming for 3 hours we would go home at 6pm. It would be pitched dark outside. Go home do my homework, eat and go to bed to get ready for school the next day. This was the usual for about 3 months.

The unusual practices were the worst. We would have to arrive at school 6am in the morning to swim, go to school, and then swim again afterward. I hated early morning swims.

Well thats most of my experience which lasted for about 6 years.