yes you can!

After not sleeping because of my research paper, I got to not sleep again because this morning, at 6am, I was on my way to school to swim at Emory all day long.
So at 7am, when we got there and walked outside into the coldness, we had to take off our warm clothes and put on out suits, and dive into the pool. At 7am.
We warmed up for awhile, and then we had an hour to basically sit and wait for the heat sheets to arrive so everyone could swarm to the wall and copy their events on their arms, pushing and shoving like savages in a claustrophobic mob. It's a mess.
And then we swam from 8am to 3pm, and we didn't get out of our suits all day. I got out of mine at 6:30 that night.
And all day, I basically ate about 15 mini brownies, you know, the little bite-size ones, about 4 bagels, or fragments of bagels, and a bunch of iced tea. Super healthy diet.
And we went back and forth from hot to cold to shivering to sweaty, to wet to dry.
But best of all,
I was swimming my favorite event and another relatively easy event, and a relay. I was swimming a 50 free first, and I had to make sure it was rather stellar. And there were so many people at this meet that there were 22 heats (basically 22 races of the same race). I was in one of the latest heats, which fortunately means you are on the fast side. Single digit heats are just not extremely impressive.
So I cut off time on that one, and I also won the heat, and I was pretty wicked excited. I couldn't even see the results because I'm so blind, so it just looked like a neon blob bleeding all over the black screen. Oh well. But I did win, and I was pretty excited, because there were 215 people swimming it and I came in 45th. Not exactly wonderful, but better than I expected.
And my other event, the 100, is tricky because technically it's a sprint, but you can't go all out like in the 50. So I paced myself and I cut off 2 seconds, as well as winning the heat again, which I was pretty pumped about.
Too good things about this: one, I won, and I have not felt this victorious in a long time, especially with college deferrals, and general misfortunes. It was just what I needed to keep pulling through.
And two, I started swimming when I was 13. 10 years before, I had a dreadful water experience, and I almost sort of drowned at my 3rd birthday party. So I vowed I would not go past the bottom step of the pool stairs until I was 16.
You can overcome fears, no matter how long it might take, and you can become great at something, and it doesn't have to take forever. You don;t have to start when you are born; you don't have to start the piano lessons at age 4, or begin learn-to-skate at age 3. Follow your heart and your ambitions, and don't listen to people who say your dive is bad. Because you can get better at it, and soon enough - wait for it - you will blow them all out of the water (ha ha - nice little pun right there; you didn't see that coming!)