High School Swimming -Senior/Only Season

               My Senior year I decided I was going to swim during the winter. The reason I decided to is because my two best friends were trying for 3 years to get me to swim and the swim coach was a friend of my family’s and I promised her I would swim. Swimming is by far the hardest sport I have ever done in my life. You use muscles you have never used before and you are always tired. A 2 hour practice in any other sport, flies by, but a 2 hour practice for swimming feels like a 6 hour practice because there is no time to distract yourself. You have to be paying attention to your breathing, your strokes, your kick, when you should do your flip turn how many sets you have to, and how many meters you have swam. It is mentally and physically draining. But it is a great workout and I honestly wish I would have swam all 4 years of high school because I think I could’ve gotten pretty good. Swimming is awful but it feels great when you realize how much better you are getting. At the beginning of the year, I was struggling to make it through practices, and we were swimming a mile or less. By the end of the season we are swimming 3 or 4 miles. Halfway through the season we had our hell week. It was horrible. We had to swim in sweatshirts one day, shoes the next, and then swim in sweatshirts and shoes the day after that. What’s funny is during that week is when I finally started to feel my mechanics click and I was starting to get it. The worst part about that week is because of wearing the sweatshirts, my nipples started to chafe. I never had that happen before and I never want it to happen again. Swimming was tough because you had two-a-days almost every other day. Show up to school at 6am for lift and then at 7:45pm you had practice at the pool. That was a continuous cycle for 2 months. Looking back on it, it was pretty ironic what events I swam in because when we had our mock meet, I swam a 100 meter sprint and I couldn’t even finish and I threw up. By the end of the season I swam the 100 meter sprint at sectionals and got 1^st place in my heat. I don’t ever want to swim competitively like that ever again, but it was a good time while I was doing it.