E had his first swim meet today. The team’s first meet was last week, but in classic E fashion, he wanted to go check one out before participating. For today’s meet, he agreed to swim one event: 25 freestyle. “I hate backstroke, and I really don’t know how to do breaststroke,” he reasoned. “And butterfly…” His voice trailed off to indicate it was a fantasy.
Since I’m finally able to find a little time with him at the pool, we spent a little time there these last two mornings working on improving his stroke. His kick was just knee action, which resulted in a lot of splash and very little propulsion. He sunk his chin into his chest, creating a large surface to plow through the water. He wiggled his upper body from side to side to compensate for his stroke rather than rotating his shoulders along his verticle (when standing of course) axis. All this combined resulted in a very inefficient stroke, so we worked to improve that a bit.
His event had three heats today, and he was in the last heat. I could tell as heat two prepared to go that he was nervous, having serious second thoughts about the whole project.
I’m fairly certain that if I’d walked over then and asked if he wanted just to ditch the whole thing, he would have enthusiastically agreed.
I thought he might be worried about the crowd. “I don’t like the idea of doing something I’m not very good at in front of so many people,” he confided in me this morning.
I thought he might be worried about coming in dead last. I feared he would: he really doesn’t have much swimming experience other than playing around, and some of those kids his age have clearly been swimming competitively for years.
I thought he might be worried about the starting blocks: I didn’t know how many times he’s used them, and to my knowledge, he hadn’t used them at all this summer.
It turns out, though, that he was most worried about being disqualified. “A and O told me that if you pull your head straight out of the water to get a breath instead of turning to the side, you’ll get DQ’ed,” he explained. “I really didn’t want to get DQ’ed.”
I assured him that was not the case even though it could very well be the case. “Whatever the case,” I thought to myself, “we’ll never know if he gets DQ’ed unless he’s a contender for one of the higher places.” In the end, he got second place in his heat. Granted, there were only two swimmers, but we laughed about that. “I’m just proud of you for conquering this fear,” I told him.
“Thank you,” he smiled, hugging me and telling me probably for the 100th time today, “I love you, Daddy.”