Swimming and athletics

And the next activity to finish for the year was swimming.  (After music, art, basketball and ballet.)

Mulan and Miya have both, for the past two years, been having weekly 30-minute lessons at Swim Lovers' Swim School in Belmont.  The owner and main teacher, Jean, is awesome with the kids.  She is the main reason that we go there.

When we first started two years ago, Mulan was able to float and bob around and put her head under the water, but that was about it.  Now, she has a beautiful freestyle stroke, can confidently do backstroke and breaststroke, and is improving well with butterfly.

As for Miya, two years ago she was a complete beginner who wasn't even putting her face under the water.  Now, she can do a few breaths with her freestyle, and has almost clicked with being able to keep going.  Her backstroke is very good, and she is working on dolphin kick.

I think swimming is one of those essentials that all children should learn when they are young.  It is such an important skill to have in life.

I also think it is important to learn swimming in a steady, long-term way.  I noticed in China that many Chinese parents send their children to swimming lessons in a short intensive burst, such as daily over a single school holiday.  Then they treat it as if they don't need to keep going after that, as the child seemingly then knows how to swim.  I think that is a mistake, as I think only with the steady, long-term learning can a child truly pick up how to swim properly.

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Mulan, Miya and I are all members of Takapuna Athletics Club.  This is the girls' second season there, while I have been there on and off since I was ten.

Clubnights are on Wednesday evenings.  Occasionally we also do athletics training sessions (Mondays with the club or Tuesdays as a family), though this season we have done very little extra training as we have been too busy with other things.

I had thought that we had one more clubnight next Wednesday 21st (with fun, non-points events), but it seems that sadly they have stopped doing the fun end-of-year special evening this season.  The final clubnight was this week, though we didn't attend it as it was the evening of the girls' ballet performance.

As I say, I started athletics when I was ten.  It was my main sport as a child, and I used to train for it for a couple of hours every day as a teenager.  I got to the point where I was competing at a national level, and I got three New Zealand national championship medals in the triple jump.  But then injuries, which I still have today, forced me to stop competing when I was 22.

These days, I still hobble around the track as best I can, trying to be a good role model for the kids (and reliving my youth!).  Last year I broke the club long jump record for veteran (over 40s) men, jumping 5.57 metres.  Not bad considering it was done with almost no training and having not seriously competed in almost 20 years!  This year I have had even more aches and pains, and haven't been able to do as much as I would like.

Athletics is the sort of sport where it is easy to compare people with each other, with exact times, distances and rankings.  So, it is easy to see how Mulan and Miya compare with others their ages.  It is also the sort of sport where natural talent plays a big part, and for many children, no amount of training, with either fitness or technique work, will jump them up to the top ranks.

But I emphasise to the girls that athletics is just as much about personal achievement as it is about comparing ourselves to others.  While it is nice to think about placings, if the children are doing the best they can at each moment, and making regular improvements in their times/distances, then that is the most important thing (and that they are enjoying it!).  So, each week we write down our times and distances after our events, putting them on the computer to see how they improve over time.  (It also works as a good computing and maths lesson!)

Having said that, outside of club athletics, Mulan and Miya aren't bad runners, seeming to be faster than most their age.  At our local club, they both come about in the middle of their grades for all the running events.

Field events are more about technique, and both girls have been working on getting the right movements.  Mulan's discus is starting to look very smooth, and she is generally in about the top three at the club.  She is also doing pretty well in the long jump, with the occasional win and in the top three or so.  Miya, at Grade 6, isn't officially doing any field events, but with our family practices she is beginning to get the hang of the field event movements.

While it is clear that athletics is unlikely to be the girls' main sport, I think it is a good sport to keep doing.  I think the sorts of body movement skills taught, for both track and field events, are extremely useful for many areas of life.  Equally importantly, we are all enjoying it.