My First Meet

I’ve told the tale of my very last swim meet, but I haven’t recounted the day that started it all, the tale of my very first swim meet. Sometime around 15 years ago I swam my first meet, and let me tell you 8-year-old me did not know what was coming for her. I’m not sure why, but for some reason I had some dramatically wrong assumptions about what exactly happens at a swim meet. Maybe my first coach didn’t really take the time to fill me in, or maybe I just wasn’t really listening when he did. Either way, when I got to the meet that day, I was shocked. So, sit back and relax while I give my account of my first swim meet…

Before we get to that fateful day of my first meet, I’m going to back up a smidge. A year or so before I started swimming, I had a friend who swam. One day, she was late to something because she had a swim meet. Well, as a 7-year-old who knew absolutely nothing about swimming, I thought that was a strange reason to be late to something. She got to be late because she spent the morning meeting up with people at the pool? Absolutely ridiculous. Once I joined the swim team a year or so later, I realized that a swim meet entailed much more than just hanging out with your friends. However, I still was fuzzy on what actually happened.

So, we get to the day of my first swim meet. The biggest misconception that I had was that time didn’t really matter. In my 8-year-old head, I thought that whoever looked the best in the water would win. That’s why there were officials, they were there to judge whose swimming was the prettiest, duh. I truly do not know how I got this notion into my head. Maybe I was confused about the difference between swimming and synchronized swimming?? I have no idea. Obviously, I realized in my first race that time does, in fact, matter quite a lot in swimming. While I thought that time didn’t matter in an individual event, I had it in my head that the only time that time mattered was when you were swimming a relay. The only explanation for this must be that I had seen some Olympic coverage of a relay at some point. I definitely wasn’t wrong that you needed to swim fast on a relay, but I certainly wasn’t right about what I thought about swimming an individual event. I think this might have set the tone for the rest of my swimming career and can explain why I would swim much faster on relays until the day I retired.

I’m really not sure why I was so wrong about what you did at a swim meet, but it only took one meet for me to come to terms with how things really went. Looking back, I am endlessly amused by how terribly wrong I was. Can you imagine, 8-year-old me diving into her first race thinking she needed to have the most beautiful technique in the water? Absolutely ridiculous, haha. I think I was a bit relieved if anything that this wasn’t how things were run, because I knew that it was going to take a long time to make my stroke look halfway decent.  Fifteen years later, I’m really not sure, if my coach actually didn’t fill me in or if I was just a little bit stupid, but maybe take this as a sign to make sure your swimmer is clear on what it will be like the day they go to their first meet.