Let's take a step back and enjoy a good laugh at ourselves.
Here, I'll start.
This happened on my first meet ever.
I had only been swimming for 4 weeks and my freestyle was really starting to come together. I was looking at a 1:03-1:05 time slip.
All day long I had been seated in the "barely able to float" heats but found myself in a single digit heat for this race. I knew my weakest points were my turns and (especially) my starts.
So they call for us to take the blocks. I climb up, my stomach full of butterflies.
"Take your marks", I balance on tip toes like my coach had been instructing me, waiting to spring out into action.
I'm thinking that if I can get a good start I may actually be able take this race. So, I start leaning a little forward in preparation for the starting horn.
It seems like an eternity that we're standing there, me balancing on the edge of this block. I think he's got to sound the horn any moment and lean a bit into it to get a good start.
WRONG! I fell face first into the pool.
Have a nice day, maybe next time.
To make matters worse I had brought my video camera to the meet so we could tape ourselves and look over it the next week.
I've had to relive this nightmare over and over more times I care to admit.
Upon watching the tape, it's obvious the starter saw me leaning into the start and held off. I thought I was being sneaky but after watching it on film I think everyone there could see me trying to edge out the start.
Former Member
The most embarrassing moments are when I'm taking off my suit and I discover my undernetting ripped and is straggling out the back and another time when both rear cheeks were ripped at the same time.
The next most embarrassing thing is admitting that I sometimes wear good fitting suits until they wear out.
Ditto that about running into walls and anything else that moves or doesn't move when swimming backstroke. I would say I'm less of a backstroke swimmer because I am rightly cautious about causing damage.
69gscal, should I ask what is the meaning of your handle?
I actually have several such stories.....I think I mentioned this one on a different thread many months ago.......when I was in Jr. High I showed up for early morning practice (Space City Aquatics Team in Clear Lake TX) half asleep one morning.......when we got there I took off my warmups and got up on the starting blocks to dive in for warmup when Nancy Macrea sp?? (some of y'all Texans may remember her) said....Hey Bork don't you think you forgot somethin.....I looked down and saw that I was standing there in my underwear in front of the entire team.....the bright side of the story was that I got to skip workout that morning b/c the coach didn't have any spare suits for me. Thank God Nancy said somethin before I dove in!!
This next one was a potentially scarring event for me:
I went to a swim meet with SCAT when I was about 12 years old or so.....and I noticed Bobby Hunt and some of my other team mates laughing and pointing at me from a distance.....so when I approached them to see what was so funny, they handed me the heat sheet for the meet and pointed to my name....apparently my name was mispelled everywhere it appeared on the heat sheet as Jim Dorkowski instead of Jim Borkowski......You can only imagine how long it took to shake that new nickname!!
Newmastersswimmer
p.s. o.k. that 2nd story took a lot of guts for me to share with y'all......I know that y'all are now all grown up and too mature now to hit me with that nickname again right?
Years ago, I was swimming 50 free in canadian Nats SCM in Toronto and came in much too close on the turn & both my heels hit the top of the bulkhead & of course I was sort of hanging there for a moment like a beached whale. The boom had attracted the attention of EVERYONE in the pool & heard about it forever.
I am one of those swimmers who will probably be forever stuck in the slow lane. Consequently, I get to meet a lot of our new swimmers (most of whom, unlike me, improve and "graduate" to the faster lanes over time).
Years ago there was a new guy who started showing up at our workouts. He attended practice fairly regularly.
One day I stopped at a grocery store after work. There was a man in the produce aisle, dressed in slacks, shirt, and a tie, who looked familiar. We looked at each other for a minute and then I realized that it was the new guy from the pool.
He said "hello" to me and I said, "Oh, hi. I didn't recognize you with your clothes on."
Another customer standing nearby gave us a funny look.
The guy never came to the pool again.
