I started swimming at a very young age. I was swimming with a coach, and training, at the age of 4 (whilst still at nursery school). Swimming suited me perfectly, since as a child I was shy, and quiet in public. I was a bundle of excitably mental and physical energy at home, but I found it very awkward to be around other people (and in a sense, I'm still that way).
I remember for the first months in kindergarten they couldn't get me to play with the kids. I would pitch up and draw for hours. I loved the huge sheets of paper they had, and that we could paint with water colors, or fingerpaint, or play with clay. It took a lot of cajolling to get me to loosen up, and when I did, I went nuts. I even performed in a play at the end of the year, where I had to stand up and shout: "HERE COMES THE KING, LET'S RUN AND HIDE." We used to build forts with planks in the trees. It was a lot of fun. Even so, I found a lot of comfort and thrill in the water, and as I say, in drawing. I loved to draw Disney characters, and what we were seeing on TV and movies (Heidi, Pinnochio, Peter Pan The Rescuers etc.)
I was also following in my brother's footsteps, though not quite. He was able to swim all the strokes perfectly, whereas I had a useless breastroke (it still sucks) and my freestyle was VERY free. My father referred to it as the windmeul [windmill].
My brother though inadvertantly painted a large target on his back. A lot of his friends swam with him and kept him company, whereas very few of my kindergarten buddies were interested, and those who were didn't swim particularly fast. When I tried to hang with my brother's friends, they laughed at me. And so that's how I started to work and focus on my swimming. It wasn't long before I was swimming just as fast as my brother and his pals, and that meant I was the quickest in my age group. One year in primary school we broke a freestyle relay record by 13 seconds. I won a few medals at Aquabears and Sasolburg and I broke a backstroke record at one point, but I was no Ryk Neethling, and I wasn't referring to the performances of American swimmers as he was, I was looking to my brother and people from our club (Otters and Seals, people like Barry Visser, and Allan Louis, and his two brothers).
I went to every Interhigh gala - not a huge feat - but I started with Free State Colors at the age of 7, and got it in Butterfly two years later. Two years after that I was a very serious 11 year old, and I knew who I was competing against. Luke Wollenschlaeger was a giant, and worse, he was a year younger than me. Next to him I was a pipsqueak. There was also Almero Strauss - a quiet, strong, white haired boy from Jim Fauche, and Mark Collie, who would go to Currie Cup. I wanted Free State colors again, and I needed to beat all these boys to get it. So I quit soccer (I was playing first team and Free State soccer at the time) to focus on swimming. I trained six days a week, often twice a day. Sometimes we even trained on Sundays. Some days I cried in my goggles. Other times my arms were too tired to lift to brush my hair. I swam so much when I looked at light bulbs I saw rainbows.
I'm not going to recount the race (I have before on this blog) other than to say Luke and I powered ahead of Almero and touched at the same time, 30.something. They gave me first.
The sacrifices that went into the race, and the 50/50 gamble of who won in the end didn't quite make sense to me. It didn't make the sacrifice worth it. I could also see that my body wasn't quite cut out for swimming (my coach said I was about to grow, but I've always been a bit too short for the sport, although I still have a big chest and long arms). The other thing was that at the same time that I waqs training like hell in swimming, and doing okay, I wasn't training at all in athletics (other than soccer practise) and then I would sneak a 2nd or 3rd in 100 metre sprints, and in the long jump. For many years I was the fastest swimmer and runner in my class, and I was one of the youngest boys in my class. So there was definitely a temptation to try athletics and other sports besides.
At the end of that year Penny Prideaux quit and went to Cape Town. That was a big blow. There was nothing wrong with Simon Gray, except that he came from Welkom and seemed to bring some of my arch enemies (like Mark Collie) from there into the squad...and he started off with quite technical training so I couldn't hear him (we had to write down heart rates etc and I had doctor's instructions to protect my ears so could never make out what he was saying). My first few workouts were miserable.
I had ear problems my whole life just like I had problems with my teeth. I suffered from ear ache, and several times from holes in my ear drums (where the chlorine had literally eaten through). This lead to me breathing on one side, something I still do today. Doctors today comment on the narrowness of my ear tubes; something I believe was an adaptation to those many hours spent in the water as a boy.
In the pool I had a nose clip and stuff in my ears, outside I had external braces. I was a mess outwardly, although inwardly I was the same boy with a strong fighting spirit. The addition of Grey High school, with all the older boys become pubescent assholes, was difficult for me to handle. My brother left as well, and my coach.
And then I left the sport completely for a few weeks.
It wasn't really a spontaneous decision. While I was training for my win, I resolved to take a breather (whether I won or not). And 'then see'. When I won the coach for Grey High secondary approached me, and told me how important I was going to be for the High School. He also wanted me to train in Grey's swimming pool, which I knew wasn't going to work.
Grey shipped in some of the best swimmers from other schools, which made it harder just to qualify for interhigh (you had to come 1st or 2nd). Now I was swimming against 5/6 of the best swimmers in the Free State. So I was often coming third, and often asked to swim the 100 Butterfly to let the other swimmers off the hook.
There are a lot of reasons. Even though I never regained the high level I had as a pikkie, I swam regularly in high school, and probably even more in university (but on my own, focussing on 1500m). I did attempt a comeback, and in matric I tried again, but family stress was worse than ever. In the end, I lost focus. For me, I achieved what I thought was enough for the time - #1 in the Free State. SA colors seemed very vague and hard to pursue (not hard to do as much as hard to figure out what to do and how), and I saw a lot of crazy swimmers in my time (I must have seemed off my rocker at times too), and didn't really see the sport as worth investing in. Especially since I didn't even have clarity on who would coach me, or how. And that was never really resolved.
So I do have a few regrets. I would have liked a better high school stint, but I did try and swimming served me beautifully as a triathlete, and I won races and managed podium finishes after school. My swimming background serves me still ;-)
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