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Swimming Tale
John is a twenty one year old man, who lives with his parents, currently he is studying a major in chemical engineering in his city’s tech. Everything is science to John, he really likes it, but not everything was this way, to be exactly it was completely the opposite. When John was seven years old he was a little kid who liked playing videogames with his friends almost all days and eating all kinds of delicious stuff that his grandmother used to prepare him, a normal kid in the block. John as a little kid was taken by force to swimming classes by his mom, a very strict woman. Of course, because of this he disliked the idea of attending there at the point he didn’t want to make friends, because of this, he was the lonely boy in the pool.
John’s mother used to hang a lot with her friends, and she still does. In one of those hangouts she mentioned that his son was learning how to swim, one of her friends responded gratefully, she liked the idea of her son also knowing how to swim. Because of this, her friend proceeded to make her son attend those classes too. Maybe it was destiny showing off, but her friend’s son resulted to be John best friend. Now John would not feel lonely and sad ever again. Because of his best friend John started making new friends and enjoying those swimming classes.
One day, a new coach showed up in John’s class, he seemed a little mad and old. But this wasn’t the new coach of the swimming courses or anything like that. He resulted to be the modern pentathlon national team coach. Modern pentathlon is a discipline in which the gathering of five different sports take place to create a final outcome in which the people compete to see who is the best of the best. Its sports consists of race running, fencing, pistol shooting, free swimming and show jumping. Basically, the performers of the modern pentathlon were almost like full armored knights, John thought. This coach was just staring at the swimming students, John found this to be a little odd, but at the end this resulted in the coach’s decision to make a competition between the students to see who the best of the class was. It resulted that he had a deal with the swimming coach that consisted in if the swimming coach allowed him see his students, the best student of the class would have an opportunity to compete next month in the selection of new modern pentathlon athletes.
John wasn’t the best of the class, he did made a lot of effort but because he took his time to actually learn something he merely could float. Even though, the idea of being part of the team made him excited. The pentathlon coach made the students line up in front of each pool lane, as the pool was a Semi-Olympic size one it only had 5 lanes. There was around 25 students, so, sets of five students per race were made. John was in the third set, he got in line with three boys that he didn’t knew at all, the fourth member of the set was indeed, John’s best friend. This was actually the first time of John being on a real competition, the bad news were that the distance they had to travel was the total length of pool, around 25 meters long, a distance that John hadn’t traveled before by his own.
The first set started, his classmates made it look pretty easy, even though John felt anxious because this was his first time doing so. He felt a huge struggle with his own feelings, on one side he wanted to be part that team and in the other one, he was frightened that he could drown. His friend saw that he had a long face, so he decided to go and see what was going on with him. John told him about his fear, he told him that nothing could happen to him inside that pool because he swam pretty well, and if it does, he would go to rescue him. This made John happy and decided to swim that set, now he was confident enough to get in front that lane.
The five were in their respective places for the set to begin, a noise of a gun sounded and they all got into the water. They got out from the pool, the coach approached John and told him, “You’re in”. This was the beginning of a new stage in John’s life. At the age of twenty he left his training and dedicate completely into his major.
