Building Up My Muscles...

While my summer plans aren't entirely set, I think I've got it figured out for the next few months at least. I'm still living in Ann Arbor and looking for a part-time job to carry through to fall semester, but I got an internship with one of my independent study teachers doing some research for about 20 hours a week. It pays pretty well, it'll look great on a resume, it'll get my name out in the research and PE world with the studies we turn in, and though it may sound boring it's actually kind of cool. It's something I actually know a lot about, and she seems to really value my opinion, and I can see where this research is going and could help.

Aside from the internship, I'm also taking a UMove class to get certified WSI and LG (water safety instructor and life guard) which anyone hoping to teach PE to jr high or high school would need to have. This is where my big muscles come into play. We had our first class yesterday, it meets twice a week for 3 hours each class. The first hour was basic 1st class stuff, but most of the next 2 hours was spent in the pool. We were given two lanes in the pool and split into good experienced swimmers and bad inexperienced swimmers. Seeing as I like to swim and have been doing it forever, and the bad swimmer group was bigger, I chose to jump in the good lane. Boy was I wrong. They were so fast and they all brought their own goggles! I ended up switching to the other group and found that they really didn't know what they were doing. Basically, I fell between the groups, but if you could choose to be the best of the bad group or the worst of the good group, which would you choose?? We were shown a style of stroke, then asked to swim 100 yards of that stroke, then we'd get out of the pool and see the next stroke and get back in and swim another 100 yards. It's been a loooong while since I've done that much swimming all at once and I was pooped until we got to the resting strokes. In the end, my muscles just felt nicely stretched, but of course they don't feel so nice anymore! I'm so sore now, but I'm excited to be really fit by the end of this class!! Plus, my sister was trying to talk me into a mini-triathlon, but the swimming part was always so intimidating. Maybe after this I'll be able to do it!! Oh, but there was something pretty funny about the class. As with most PE classes, most of the students are university athletes, and several of them were wrestlers in my slow swimmer group. Most of the time, no body fat would be a good thing, but not in swimming! They totally sank! The teacher kept trying to use me as an example of how to glide through the water so you don't have to stroke so much, but they couldn't do it! They just kept flapping their arms and splashing away. Now it seems nice that I've got my body fat! Maybe by the end, I'll be swimming in the fast group and fit as Michael Phelps!!