I love the stories about who motivated you to start swimming. They're usually great stories. Let me start by telling you mine.
I was with about 7yrs. old and at a 20yd indoor Grand Rapids West YMCA pool, during a "free swim".
The lifeguard was the YMCA Director named Tom (about 25 or so at the time). I knew how to do the breaststroke pretty good for no formal coaching (my older brother swam competitively). It was a Saturday and there were about twenty screaming kids in the pool until Tom blew his whistle. He yelled at everyone to get out of the water and you could hear a pin drop (someone had to be in trouble). He pointed at me and told me to come over and see him. I thought I would pee right there. I didn't do anything anyway, I told myself, and he shouldn't be yelling at people so loud, I thought. I was thinking of what I might have done in the last few minutes as I walked slowly his way until I gulped and stood silent waiting for him to say something. He said to everyone, "You're a pretty fast swimmer and I want to race you across the pool". I was looking at him as everyone of the kids started hooting and hollering. "Well" he said, "Let's go". He told me that we'd be doing the breaststroke. I wanted to race, I wanted to win, even if he was bigger. When he said go, I raced and he sure looked like he was going as fast as he could, and ---- I won. He looked exhausted after that long 20 yard swim, I know I was really tired but I beat him fair and square. He spent about five minutes explaining that someone as fast as me should be on the YMCA swimming team. I couldn't believe it, he wanted me to join the team, heck, I didn't even know they had a team. Well, I almost hyperventilated as I told my mom and dad that I wanted to be on the swim team because I'm the fastest little swimmer that coach had ever seen. I've been swimming and coaching (I wanted to be a coach like him) ever since.
To this day, that one man changed my life by doing something I try to do as much as possible and that's; find something good someone's doing and, only if it's sincere, lavish as much praise as possible onto that someone. Tom did it for me and I hope I can keep doing it for other people and swimmers, young and old. He was a master at making people feel like a million bucks.
Let's hear your story. Coach T.
Parents
Former Member
My story's a bit stranger.
At 14 I couldn't even tread deep water (even though I was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt where Summers lasted from Late April to late September and beaches were abundant). The year I turned 14, to impress a girl, I somehow managed to "swim" dog-paddle or side-kick or a combination thereof, some 30 metres to a buoy. In order to "impress" her more, I decided to learn how to swim.
I bought a book. Johnny (Tarzan) Weismuller's "Swimming the Australian Crawl". I devoured it, cover to cover, several times and then we moved to Port-Said (Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal) in 1958. There we joined a social club that had a 50 metre pool (first time I'd even seen a pool) and there I tried to do in the pool what I'd read in the book.
(((Still nothing about competitive swimming, the astute reader will note)))
We were a bunch of teenagers then, only interested in girls and impressing, and trying to date, them. A guy, around my age (i.e., another teen) upon hearing one of the girls saying how she liked my "style" of swimming, challenged me to a "duel in the pool". Port-Said back then, although a city, was really a large small town where practically everybody knew everybody. Word of the "duel" spread amongst our groups of friends and the highschools (boys and girls, no co-ed back then). It had been arranged for a weekend.
The day came and hearts pounding there we stood the two of us at the edge of the pool (there were no starting blocks). We had an audience. On that day, the "social" club admitted our non-member friends in to the pool area to watch "The Race". I won the 50m Free race (by quite a few metres, I recall, doing it in about 30 seconds, timed by a lifeguard, on a regular non-stopwatch). What I didn't know back then were two things: That I had done it in what was, back then in 1959, an OK time and that I had a good (SPL-wise) but awful (limping, lop-sided) style.
(((Still nothing about real competitive swimming, the impatient reader will remark)))
In 1960 my father passed away and my mother and three younger brothers (and I) moved in with my maternal grandparents in Cairo, where I joined the Guezira Sporting Club.
That club was the "in" place to be; a country club with two pools (one Olympic 50m and the other a 33.333 yard one). The club had the best swimming team in Egypt and if you really wanted to impress girls that was the team to be on.
It was an elite team and not easy to join, so I decided to try and see if I
could attract the attention of Monsieur Alex, the coach. The team was practicing, using four of the eigh-lanes, the other four being left open to the club's leisure swimmers. I clung close to the dividing lane rope and (kind of) raced the real swimmers, doing only 50's.
The coach did call me over, told me I swam "like a camel" but that I could join the team.
I did but was unable to keep up with them (with even the slowest of them) for any distance over 50.0009 metres. I didn't know it then and the coach did not mention anything to me, but I limped as I swam. Why?
In "Tarzan"'s book, I had read but failed to realize I had missed applying a very important aspect of swimming. Breathing.
I discovered "breathing" by accident. The coach asked me to swim with, side-by-side, not ahead of, Kiko, the slowest swimmer on the team. I felt insulted but I wanted to stay on the team, so I did my best to slow myself way down and stay even with Kiko. As I practically bobbed up and down, rather than moving forward, I found that my face was in the water for quite a long time and that I really, really, really had to let the air out (air? it was CO2). That was when I discovered that I had been holding my breath when my face was submerged and that when I rolled my face out of the water to my left, I was exhaling first and then inhaling; thus my "limp". All it took was one time, I exhaled in the water and when I turned my face, I didn't even have to inhale, the air rushed in, all by itself. That day, nobody could make stop. I did all the sets that Kiko did, resting when he did, moving when he did. Next practice session, the coach promoted me to another, much faster group.
From then on, I was entered in races (we didn't have the 50m Free back then as an official race) so I did 100m, 200m, 400m and 1500m. However, as George Bernard Shaw said it, "Youth is a wonderful thing. Pity it's wasted on the young." Being young (and foolish and somewhat talented) I never trained seriously enough. I regret it now. After 45 years of smoking, even though I know how I should breathe while swimming (I even remember how it used to feel) I am unable to breathe deeply whenever I want to. That's why it's only 50m (occasionally a bad 100m) for me in the Masters now.
Cheers.
My story's a bit stranger.
At 14 I couldn't even tread deep water (even though I was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt where Summers lasted from Late April to late September and beaches were abundant). The year I turned 14, to impress a girl, I somehow managed to "swim" dog-paddle or side-kick or a combination thereof, some 30 metres to a buoy. In order to "impress" her more, I decided to learn how to swim.
I bought a book. Johnny (Tarzan) Weismuller's "Swimming the Australian Crawl". I devoured it, cover to cover, several times and then we moved to Port-Said (Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal) in 1958. There we joined a social club that had a 50 metre pool (first time I'd even seen a pool) and there I tried to do in the pool what I'd read in the book.
(((Still nothing about competitive swimming, the astute reader will note)))
We were a bunch of teenagers then, only interested in girls and impressing, and trying to date, them. A guy, around my age (i.e., another teen) upon hearing one of the girls saying how she liked my "style" of swimming, challenged me to a "duel in the pool". Port-Said back then, although a city, was really a large small town where practically everybody knew everybody. Word of the "duel" spread amongst our groups of friends and the highschools (boys and girls, no co-ed back then). It had been arranged for a weekend.
The day came and hearts pounding there we stood the two of us at the edge of the pool (there were no starting blocks). We had an audience. On that day, the "social" club admitted our non-member friends in to the pool area to watch "The Race". I won the 50m Free race (by quite a few metres, I recall, doing it in about 30 seconds, timed by a lifeguard, on a regular non-stopwatch). What I didn't know back then were two things: That I had done it in what was, back then in 1959, an OK time and that I had a good (SPL-wise) but awful (limping, lop-sided) style.
(((Still nothing about real competitive swimming, the impatient reader will remark)))
In 1960 my father passed away and my mother and three younger brothers (and I) moved in with my maternal grandparents in Cairo, where I joined the Guezira Sporting Club.
That club was the "in" place to be; a country club with two pools (one Olympic 50m and the other a 33.333 yard one). The club had the best swimming team in Egypt and if you really wanted to impress girls that was the team to be on.
It was an elite team and not easy to join, so I decided to try and see if I
could attract the attention of Monsieur Alex, the coach. The team was practicing, using four of the eigh-lanes, the other four being left open to the club's leisure swimmers. I clung close to the dividing lane rope and (kind of) raced the real swimmers, doing only 50's.
The coach did call me over, told me I swam "like a camel" but that I could join the team.
I did but was unable to keep up with them (with even the slowest of them) for any distance over 50.0009 metres. I didn't know it then and the coach did not mention anything to me, but I limped as I swam. Why?
In "Tarzan"'s book, I had read but failed to realize I had missed applying a very important aspect of swimming. Breathing.
I discovered "breathing" by accident. The coach asked me to swim with, side-by-side, not ahead of, Kiko, the slowest swimmer on the team. I felt insulted but I wanted to stay on the team, so I did my best to slow myself way down and stay even with Kiko. As I practically bobbed up and down, rather than moving forward, I found that my face was in the water for quite a long time and that I really, really, really had to let the air out (air? it was CO2). That was when I discovered that I had been holding my breath when my face was submerged and that when I rolled my face out of the water to my left, I was exhaling first and then inhaling; thus my "limp". All it took was one time, I exhaled in the water and when I turned my face, I didn't even have to inhale, the air rushed in, all by itself. That day, nobody could make stop. I did all the sets that Kiko did, resting when he did, moving when he did. Next practice session, the coach promoted me to another, much faster group.
From then on, I was entered in races (we didn't have the 50m Free back then as an official race) so I did 100m, 200m, 400m and 1500m. However, as George Bernard Shaw said it, "Youth is a wonderful thing. Pity it's wasted on the young." Being young (and foolish and somewhat talented) I never trained seriously enough. I regret it now. After 45 years of smoking, even though I know how I should breathe while swimming (I even remember how it used to feel) I am unable to breathe deeply whenever I want to. That's why it's only 50m (occasionally a bad 100m) for me in the Masters now.
Cheers.
