Activity #12

Swimming Year-Round with SwimGSA

August 2014-March 2015

200 hrs 

Action (200 hrs) 

Outcome 1 was easily achieved because practicing on a year round swim team involves exposing yourself and others to your strengths and weaknesses as a swimmer. Outcome 5 comes with the commitment involved in swimming in a year round team.

Swimming is one of the most strenuous physical activities you can do. It works nearly every muscle in the body and pushes your cardiovascular system like crazy. I chose this as my sole sport in the 5th grade, after trying nearly every other sport. I have been doing it ever since, except for a short hiatus I took junior year, which I did because I knew junior year would be the toughest year of school so far, and I didn’t want the commitment of swimming to get in the way of swimming. My senior year I started back up, with the main goal of reaching the fastest times I achieved my last year of swimming. The most important time I wanted to get again was the 51.37 I swam in the 100 yard freestyle my sophomore year. That was a fast time for my age, so I thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to get it my senior year. I swam from August to March, and finally got a 51.3 at a meet and called it a day. The Spring musical was starting to ramp up, and I had enabled myself to swim well in the by-then finished high school swimming season. Since this is my senior year, that would be the last time I swam on a year-round team.

Swimming taught me a lot of lessons about life. It taught me that you have to set goals if you ever plan on getting better at something. That applies to everything in life, and I never fully understood that until this year. I had specific times I wanted to get because they were times I had already hit two years earlier. Swimming also teaches you that time management is crucial in being successful, for if you can’t prioritize the things you have committed to, it will be difficult to do well in any of them. My TOK teacher junior year stressed that to me frequently, claiming that I said ‘yes’ to too many people and requests, not giving myself enough time to be me. I realized that, while swimming was excellent for my physical fitness, it was also straining on my mentality. Getting up at 4:30 in the morning to go to practice was something I never enjoyed doing, but I did it because I knew it would bring good outcomes in my swimming performance. In the end, swimming made me a better person because I discovered that I had to set my course in life and stay off the beaten trail if I wanted to remain on the road to success.