Personal Narrative: Deepest Swimming

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A quote I have heard many times throughout my life is “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result.” This has constantly been harped on me by my dad all throughout my swimming career. Whether it was my breaststroke or freestyle I always strove to do better but wouldn’t always come up with the results I was looking for. That is when my dad would mention this quote and explain to me that in order to get better I would have to put in the extra work and do things I had never done before in order to get better. Many times I never really listened and didn’t take the time to do what he suggested in order to improve myself. I would often brush off the meaning behind the quote and deem it as useless, but one …show more content…

The meets leading up to senior state hadn’t been going very well for me and I found myself stuck with the same times I had been going all season. I had two and a half hours of practice every day and six days a week and I still wasn’t getting the results I wanted. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong and it often left me feeling defeated and distressed. Every single time I would come home from a bad meet my dad would say to me how I can’t expect to get faster in a race if I do the same thing every time to prepare me for one. He would often tell me that if what I was doing wasn’t working then I needed to try something else in order to get something else as a result. Even though I knew he was saying these things to help me get better it still never really registered with me the importance of what he was saying and I would continue to do what I had always been doing. Finally, after a particularly bad meet, I decided I was going to take my dad’s advice and try to do something new to improve my times. My dad and I would go to the pool near us two days out of the week and work on different drills and techniques in order to fix my stroke. We would also do workouts every night in order to increase my strength and agility. Along with the workouts and drills we would watch various swim