• New Community Perks Jul 14 at 10:44 PM

    7k races in the last 24h = Orb Challenge Odds x3 | 8k races in the last 24h = Orb Challenges Odds x4 + Better Pet Odds. Enjoy :-)

Author: 𝓜𝕠𝓩ⱥ𝔯t

The plunge as you dive off the blocks into the water, and the adrenaline rushing through your veins as you race to the other end. The turnaround, and the act of launching off again. Neck-and-neck with the lane over! That feeling when you finish and see you've won your heat. It's glorious. This is the swim team! Swim season usually happens over the summer, with some people swimming throughout the winter via indoor pools. A swim team can be challenging at times, but it is definitely worth it. The practices can be grueling: hundreds of meters for each stroke done in a repeated routine. But, if you persevere it can give you amazing speed in (and out) of the water. There are 4 types of strokes mainly used in competition. Freestyle is generally considered the fastest and easiest stroke out there. It simply involves bringing your arms out of the water in a rhythm, while kicking the whole time. It can be done fast during a meet or slow during practice as a warmup to get you started. Freestyle always needs a one handed touch at the end of a race. In the middle of a race on the far wall you can do flip turns, which are forward flips followed by pushing off the wall in a streamline underwater. The next major form is breaststroke. Most of the work is done by your legs, which move in a frog-like way while your arms pull in front of your chest. It is probably the calmest and slowest of all of the strokes. You always need to do a two handed touch for breaststroke. Third is backstroke, which is essentially freestyle on your back. You move your arms in the same way and kick in the same way except you're on your back; which can be kind of challenging, especially if the person next to you decides that they want to kick really hard. That can result in a whole mass of waves splashing over your face to make you cough or sputter. When doing backstroke, you use a one handed touch with more skilled swimmers sometimes doing bucket turns in the middle. Last of all we have the butterfly stroke, which most people consider the hardest of the four. Butterfly is quite a fatiguing stroke, but once you get into the right rhythm, you can maintain it for quite a while. While doing butterfly, instead of performing flutter kicks like with freestyle and backstroke, or froggy kicks like with breast stroke, you keep your legs together and kick them up and down in rhythm. Your arms, meanwhile, whip a few inches out of the water in a circular movement as if you are racing forward, pulling down and out of the water again, breathing at every stroke. Butterfly is the most fun stroke because while it is a challenge, it gives you an amazing sense of power when swimming it in a race and makes your legs feel like they're supercharged, something the other strokes can't quite capture. Generally a new swimmer learns freestyle first, then backstroke, then breaststroke, and finally butterfly. Swim meets are very possibly the most fun part of a swim team. Each meet is divided into events, which are certain amounts of each stroke. For example, a 25 yard event is a single lap, going from wall to wall. Each event is named for its length in yards. If competing in an Olympic sized swimming pool, the size is doubled, with one lap being 50 yards. The length of events during a meet vary greatly, with distances ranging from a 25 yard sprint to a 1500 yard endurance race that could take up to a half hour of nonstop swimming to complete. Freestyle is mainly used as an endurance stroke, although longer distances of the other strokes are competed as well. Generally Butterfly is only done in amounts of 25 to 100 yards because it is so difficult, especially when swimming quickly. Each event alternates between boys and girls. They are also divided into age groups, with children under 12 being in one group and 12 and up being in another, to make the races more fair. Then each event is further split up between different heats so that every person gets their own lane. Some pools have miniature diving boards called blocks for people to safely dive from when beginning a race. The only stroke that is started in the water is backstroke since you can't do a backwards dive. Sometimes the races can be very close. Some winners can be decided by mere hundredths of a second. However, there is always a feeling of power as you plow through the water, knowing that you are in control of what you do during the race.