I started to swim beginning with swim lessons. I was three years old and afraid of the
water. I took swimming lessons in Charles City with the YMCA.The swimming teacher held me so I would get used to the water. After about four swim lessons in a row, I liked the water. After a few years of swim lessons, I moved up to competitive swimming. At the time, it was with the YMCA. I started there when I was about in third grade. We practiced at our middle school. I had to take a bus from our elementary school to the middle school everyday for practice. I was scared of the middle school a few times because of the older kids that went to school there.

When I first start to swim competitively, I was in the beginners lane. This is were I worked on the different strokes. The first one was freestyle. The coaches were teaching us how to move our body the right way. She said to move like you had a pole going though the middle part of your body. We had to rotate in the water the right way. It took me a year to understand how to do the freestyle. I eventually got to do other strokes like backstroke.

Backstroke was hard for me because I couldn’t float on my back. Backstroke was fun to learn because it taught me how to float on my back better. One of the things they said was to keep my arms straight up and roll my shoulders back and forth. Again, it took me about a year to finally understand the backstroke.

After the backstroke I moved on to the breaststroke. It was really weird for me because I didn’t like how the stroke worked and didn’t understand how to move my legs and arms. First, I was taught how to move my arms at a certain way. Then I had to move my legs a certain way as well. It was hard to get the timing down at first, but after a while I got used to it. The breaststroke took me a year as well to understand the basics of the stroke.

Then came the butterfly. When I started to learn the butterfly I hated it so much. Butterfly was a very difficult stroke because of the rhythm needed to move though the water the right way. I never got the rhythm down at all. I was really bad at butterfly when I started. It took me two years to do the stroke some what right.

I swam with the YMCA about 8 years ago. I look back to those days when I first started to swim and how hard it was for me to do it. When I moved to Fort Dodge I was still learning new things, but not as much. One thing I remember learning was how to do a flip and turn faster then what I used to do. I swam for Fort Dodge YMCA for about two years. During that two years I broke the Trochlea in my elbow. I had to have surgery to fix the bone. The bone went into my muscle and it was taken out and put back in the right place. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to swim anymore. After the surgery was done I was in a cast for a week, then I got it off. I had to have therapy to move my arm all the way straight. After I got it straight I went to the doctor to see if I was able to swim and be able to do things like push ups again. When he said yes, I was really happy that I was able to swim again. I went back to the YMCA for one more year. Then, I heard about USA swimming. I went down there one day to swim in front of the coach to see if I would make it in to the club. He said that I made it in I was really glad because this was a really good swimming team for me. I started to learn about technique witch helped me in all of my strokes. I have been with USA swimming for about four years. USA swimming helped me get to where I am at today. I was glad that I heard about USA swimming because with out it, I would never be as fast a I am now. To this day I am still learning new techniques to go even faster in swimming. I hope that I will be able to break some records and even go the Olympics.