Sweet Yet Sour

Being on a “synchro” team is actually very hard work for something that looks so silly.  We practiced three days a week for 3-4 hours.  Before getting into the pool we stretched, including doing the splits for at least 1 minute and then we put our nose clips and goggles on and got in the pool. (Nose clips, by the way, are REALLY attractive and leave these lovely red marks on the sides of your nose.)  We generally swum laps for 45 minutes, warming up with just freestyle and then we would start on our underwater laps.  I worked up to it, but in the end I was able to swim four lengths of the pool without coming up for air. After that we would do entire laps of swimming with one or both legs straight out of the water, always with our toes pointed.

The worst part of this constant toe pointing is the cramps that develop in your feet.  So much so that many times during practice your foot will cramp painfully and uncurling your toes will be impossible.  The solution to this common synchro problem?  Ramming your foot against the side of the pool until your toes uncurl.  One summer we practiced in an outdoor pool with a rough concrete side and in an attempt to uncramp my toes I scraped my toe knuckles until they bled.  I had scars for years…

After warm up laps we would practice our moves, do drills, and practice whatever routines we were working on at the moment.  Generally in competition you have a two person routine and a team routine both set to music.  As I recall I had routines set to everything from the Jaws theme music to Tears for Fears (it was the 80’s after all).

I discovered that synchronized swimming takes a lot of arm and leg strength. In order to perform the moves you generally have to be doing either a sculling move with your arms or an egg-beater kick with your legs.  Really good synchro swimmers can lift almost their entire bodies out of the water using these techniques.

There are two parts to any synchro competition.  The first part is the figures portion where you swim around the pool to different judging stations and perform whatever move you are asked to show the judge.  Then come the routines, where you wear “swim costumes”, always matching with your teammate(s), and your hair up in a bun. 

Here’s the gross part of this whole thing.  In order to get your hair to stay in a bun and not have a stray hair during competition it needs to be heavily gelled.  The common practice for this cement hairdo is to mix one cup of hot water with 4 packets of Knox gelatin.  Yep, that’s Jello-o, only really, really, hard Jell-o.  You mix this nasty concoction up and then brush it into your hair as you are putting it up in the bun.  It’s so gross!  But it works, and your hair definitely stays in place in the water.  Of course, I generally had to spend two days trying to get the stuff out of my hair, but whatever, it makes for a good story now…