I must admit that it is pretty tough to come up with blog posts over here when I haven’t been in the pool in over a month. I must really tell my body to hurry up and finish miscarrying. It is putting a serious cramp in my workout routine.

So I find myself living vicariously through my daughter, a swim teacher, now training to be a lifeguard.

She is giddy about the studying. It reminded her of driver’s training, and it kind of reminds me of when she did her internship at a local restaurant. She had to study the menu and pass a test on it before her second week was over.

Tonight’s lesson: escaping a drowning victim. Disclosure: my father is one of those non-floating bricks in the water, and once when I was a new swimmer, he thought he could just start treading water. My father started going under, and I tried to save him, but he almost drowned us both. Thankfully, the wall was right there, and I managed to pull him to the side. I’m just saying, that might be too much emotional baggage for me to try and learn lifesaving.

My daughter doesn’t have that baggage, but she was thoroughly scared tonight. People were pulling her under, and she got to learn the technique for escaping. She learned pressure points near the elbow, that, when pressed may cause the drowning victim to let go. If all else fails, she learned to escape by any means necessary–head butting, or a fist to the nose.

The idea is to save yourself so you can save the drowner (?) You won’t be any good at the bottom of the pool yourself.

Speaking of the bottom of the pool, I’ll talk about saving someone from down there next.

Ok, I guess I could make the leap. It is a tiny piece of a boat between you and the water. It at least qualifies as life on the water, right?

I guess so; I found links to the US rowing site on the diversity in aquatics site.

I remember meeting this brother that was on the University crew when I was a freshman at UM. I had never heard of crew, and when he told me it was rowing, I was intrigued. Not enough to go watch him compete, but I thought that was unusual.

Apparently, it was unusual, and still is to find black folks that row. US rowing held a one day diversity event entitled Changing the Tide: Rowing Outreach to Urban Youth. Granted, the dude I met back in the day was far from urban; affluent and preppy was more like it, but there you have it.

Oh, how to get diversity in rowing? Outreach? Fliers in public schools? Getting the word out?

I get a flashback to college with terminology like inclusion and retention. Something tells me US Rowing would get much further finding black folks that actually like to row, and have them recruit others. Like 2008 Olympian David Banks.

Kind of like the strategy for increasing black participation in competitive swimming. Just a thought.

It looks like I missed this guy when I was doing my search of Black swimming Olympians. Let me rectify that right now.

I just read an article about the #1 HBCU (historically black college or university) swim team–FAMU (Florida AM&N).

What caught my attention was that this is the top HBCU swim club, and they had almost no one in attendance at their recent swim meet. They have also struggled with the finances to keep the team viable and to maintain their facilities.

And we wonder why there are not more black swimmers? One of the girls on the women’s team has been swimming since she was 6 years old. She could have gone to school anywhere and swum for them. But she chose to go to FAMU and participate in their program.

The team has some ideas for improving attendance. I hope it works! We should encourage excellence. If you’re in the Tallahassee area, you should definitely catch the Rattlers in action!