How Swimming Changed My Life

Throughout my childhood, I lived with many difficult struggles that not many children experience such as my parents divorce and growing up unsure if there was going to be food on the table each night. During these struggles, I found peace and control through swimming. Swimming has always played a large part in my life and has taught me many vital lessons. For me, swimming has been my safe haven, where I have learned how to depend on myself and how to follow through on my commitments. Through swimming, I have learned I must be self-reliant; I cannot expect my coach, teammates, or family to get in the water and swim for me. Another powerful lesson that I have learned from years of swimming was commitment. Swimming has taught me how important it is to commit to every decision I make, no matter if it is a decision in school, at home, or in the water. When I was younger, I would never fully commit to my school work, and my grades reflected this. However, through swimming, I have realized the importance of self reliance, and the importance of commitment in all parts of my life.

I never really set a true goal to improve myself at anything until I started to swim. I began to set goals to improve my freestyle time by two seconds; Instead of improving, I found I regressed. I know that it is because during practices I should have tried harder, I could have attempted to improve outside of the pool doing dryland workouts at home, or that I should have gone to sleep at nine-thirty instead of eleven. When I am at a swim meet and I have a race, my coach is not going to be there to make sure I make it behind the blocks in time for my race. She has fifty to seventy little kids, I learned that I have to be responsible and get myself ready to swim. Those are the times when I realize I need to be able to do this on my own because the only person who I can rely on one-hundred percent of the time is