It’s called Synchronized SWIMMING, therefore, if you can swim then you should be able to do synchronized swimming right?
There had been talk of Synchronized Swimming (Synchro) in the Mermaid camp for a while but it is not something easily accessible. You can’t just rock up down your local leisure centre, put a nose clip on, throw a ghetto blaster in the water and start synchronized swimming…apparently.
During the period when we couldn’t locate anywhere to do Synchro we fantasized about how amazing we would be. At the lido a couple of people commented that Katie and I (Manda) were like synchronised swimmers… and so our estimations on how awesome we would be grew. Rio 2016 was surely on the cards
Then I saw an article in TimeOut about how Out to Swim were doing a beginners Synchro course. My first thought was “Beginners is probably a bit too easy for us” but then we might as well give it a try 😉
So on a Sunday evening, me, Katie, Kate and Suz headed off to Queen Mother Leisure Centre by Victoria to start out first session of 4. Now Suz isn’t one for turning up on time but at the first session she excelled herself. She not only turned up late, then had to turn back after realizing she didn’t have her wallet, then when she finally got in the water she declared she had had a couple of glasses of wine with lunch.
We started off by learning the “basics”. Oh my days. Cue 2 hours of pure frustration interlaced with hysterics. We were then told over the next 4 weeks we would be mastering the basics and preparing a short routine. There was the 4 of us and another lady doing the beginners course. It is safe to say that she was taking it a little bit more seriously than us and we were probably annoying her something cronic. Sorry lady number 5. Between the 5 of us we had to decide what music we wanted to preform to. Now this isn’t an easy choice as you will listen to this music over and over and over and over again. Suz suggested Le Roux and I immediately shot that down, then Kate suggested “Call me maybe” as this was our team anthem from Manhattan, even if Suz can’t remember this! I can’t even remember what song was chosen in the end, which I think was from the mental scaring and I definitely never want to hear it again.. whatever it was!
The other issue we faced was that we were doing this off the back of the open water season. We were training in the diving pool, which is a good few degrees warmer than a training pool, which in turn is alot warmer than the lido or a lake. This meant that after about 30 minutes of synchro the 4 of us were hot, dehydrated and wrinkly!
The other synchro swimmers training at the same time of us were exceptional and made it look way too easy. We knew we weren’t doing it particularly well when all we would hear for the whole 2 hours were “Kate, Kate, Amanda, Susan, Kate, Kate, Amanda, Susan, Susan, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda”. (Kate and Katie shared the name and Suz gained the new name, Susan).
I unfortunately wasn’t there for the performance nor is there any video footage but I heard that it was faultless and probably something like this..
Thank you to Out to Swim who were so lovely, patient and enthusiastic. Everyone should give it a go, if only to appreciate how hard it is!!
Unfortunately I think it is safe to say that Rio 2016 is out of reach, however, we have adjusted our goals and we think that Britain’s Got Talent 2015 could be a goer..
TEAM Mermaids 