Hetal Chirag
I was five years old when I entered a swimming pool for the first time in my life. I still remember standing at the edge of the pool and staring at deep blue water being scared and excited at the same time. I took a deep breath, jumped in and let my body be one with water. From that day onwards, swimming has become one my favourite relaxation activities. Enjoying a serene swim as your body gently glides over the water is a perfect way to unplug from the hustle and bustle of daily life.
Swimming has always been an important part of my life starting from my early childhood to high school as well as throughout my grad school. I clearly remember trying out for my high school varsity swim team at Jarvis Collegiate Institute. Although jumping in the water at 7 am during cold winter months of Toronto, Canada was not the best feeling in the world, I absolutely loved the next one and a half hour of practice that followed every morning.
While I was a part of my high school swim team, I had an opportunity to learn and improve different strokes of swimming. I found front crawl the easiest and fastest of them all. Although it was a very straight forward stroke to learn, it took a lot of practice when it came to perfecting it. The key to building speed is to push as much water with your hands as you can while trying to reduce overall surface friction.
The second stroke I learned was backstroke. Although I never used it competitively, I find it quite relaxing. Out of all four strokes I learned during high school, I found the breaststroke the easiest. Butterfly, on the other hand, was the hardest one to learn for me. I had to train my whole body to be fluid and act in one continuous motion.
After high school, I had a chance to join my MBA water polo team at Ryerson University when we participated in the MBA games. Playing inner tube water polo was a lot of fun compared to competitive swimming in high school.
