Swimming has always been a part of my life. For as long as I can remember I have had swim practice after school. I have tried all the sports. I danced, played softball, basketball, soccer, but it was always swimming for me. If you walk down a high school hallway you will see football and basketball achievements, but never swimming. Not because we don't have any, but because who cares about swimming unless you're Michael Phelps the Olympic God? The whole school will go to a basketball game or football game. You won't find many people at a swim meet.
Swimming is hard physically, but it is also mentally tough. You have to think about using every muscle in your body when you swim. Can you imagine running and holding your breath? That's what swimming is, but to make it even harder it's in the water. A lot of people think swimming is a non contact sport. What a joke. When you have your head underwater it's kind of hard to avoid contact with others. In my senior year of swimming in High School, I collided head on with another girl and got a concussion and may have fractured my nose. Another concussion for me was horrible and scared me because of my previous TBI. It is life threatening and extremely dangerous for me or anyone else who has multiple head injuries.
It frustrates me sometimes how much people don't care about the sport swimming. It has to be one of the hardest sports out there. We don't have a half time. We can't just stop in the middle of a race and call time out. I'm not saying other sports are easy. I respect those sports because I know I can't do them to save my life. Hell no to running. It's just that swimming is something you can't understand until you do it. I made my best friends from swimming and maybe it's because we had passion for something that felt would kill us.
At college I was hoping to be part of the swim team because of all of the amazing memories it gave me from High School. The swim team as a whole was a family to me. About 30 sisters in all. As a team we've become extremely close even though swimming is technically an individual sport. But because of the hardships we had put our body through in training, it brings us closer together. We see each other half naked constantly as well, so maybe that's why we were so close.
Unfortunately for me, I dislocated my knee at the end of my senior year of High School. Then on the VERY FIRST DAY of college I dislocated it again. I tried to be apart of the team, but I constantly felt like an outsider being on the side of the pool. I felt like no one knew me and I didn't know them. I was just "that one girl" who was on deck during practice.
I won't be swimming this year either. I am now five weeks out of MPFL surgery on my knee. It has been a tough journey, but I'm excited for this upcoming year. I'm going to heal and get stronger. When I get the okay I'm going to get back in the water on my own because I will have missed the season, but I plan on training so I can be a part of it next year.
When I'm frustrated, I swim. When I'm sad, I swim. When I just want to have fun, I swim. I am afraid to try different sports because I have such high expectations from swimming and I don't want to be disappointed. I'm excited for the second year of my college career and everything that I plan to do to get ready for my new beginning of swimming and exercise with my new knee.
