Swimming
By Elizabeth Miller
I love to swim and I’m a swimmer that swims during the winter and summer. During the winter I swim with a team called OCCS, for nine months and then for the summer I swim for the Ashland Stingrays. In learning how to swim, it started with me learning how to tread water. Then I started learning how to do freestyle and its techniques. I went to a swim class twice a week. Then I started to learn how to swim backstroke. I had to swim on my back to learn this stroke. This did not feel natural to me, but now it is my second best stroke.
The next stroke I had to learn was breaststroke. Breaststroke is my worst stroke out of all the strokes. I somehow cannot get both my feet to come together at the same time. Then the last stroke I learned was butterfly (the stroke). It’s my favorite stroke out of all the other strokes and my best and fastest stroke. My coach tells me that I have very powerful arms. When I got really good at swimming my swimming teacher told my parents that she thought that I should join a swim team.
The first team I joined was my summer team the Ashland Stingrays. I had to practice every morning and I started in one lane. I kept moving lanes until I got to a lane where they had the swimmers who had little or no problems with their strokes. I had a swim meet every weekend. After every practice I got to do something fun. One of the fun activity was that I got to do is dive over a noddle and do whatever stroke I wanted. It was a lot of fun.
When I do winter swim I have to wake up early in the morning. Practice starts at 6:00 am and ends at 7:30 am Monday through Friday. I have to do it before school because the evening practices would interfere with my coming to church. My morning coach is pretty tough. He does some very long drills where we sometimes have to swim 200M individual medleys several times. An individual medley is when you swim all four strokes, and 200 meters is 8 laps of the pool. Some mornings we have do that 4 or 5 times. I have to warm up before I start doing the main swimming. At the very end I usually get to dive of the diving block.
I hope that you learned a little about swimming. It is a great sport.