My cousin grew up with a community pool practically in her back yard. She and her sister loved to swim. My father was a non-swimmer, yet my brother and I both learned to swim. My father’s brothers were fraternal twins. One swam, one didn’t. All their children swam. The non-swimming brother had three sons on the high school swim team, in fact. The swimming brother was in the Navy. He’s my aforementioned cousin’s father. I’ve mentioned my father’s sister here before. She now loves to swim, and I’d frankly be surprised if her son didn’t know how to swim.

There’s a lot of talk about how non-swimming is generational. How is it that our generation in the family is all swim-literate, while the generation before us was almost swimming illiterate? Was the one sailor in the family enough to erase generations of non-swimming? Or was it just our parents’ desire to see us better off than they were, so they put us in the pool?

I don’t know. But I talked with my cousin today on Facebook, and she brought up another interesting fact: age matters in competitive swimming. She has two sons, and the younger one has been competing year-round in swimming for a year now. The older son just started the year-round competition, and it is harder for him to compete.

I found that true with my children. My daughter was forced to race 50s when she would rather have done 25s, because she was older when she started competing. My son started three years younger, working his way up to competing in 50s and 100s.

My swim team cousins probably started young, learning to swim at the Y, building their skills until they joined their high school swim teams. The youngest of those three recently started swimming again as an adult. He loves the workout, and is much fitter because of it.

My cousin had her boys in gymnastics before swimming. I had my older kids in swimming, and my younger kids in gymnastics, so I wondered which sport she preferred. She told me she preferred swimming, because “swimming can be a life long sport. I also think the risk of injury would have to be lower with swimming.”

Do you have any stories about swimming generations, or your age when you started swimming?