Thursday, March 23, 2006

I wasn't born a fish

Commonwealth being streamed through BBC has been amazing. It's let me follow pretty much everything and has given me a solid excuse to spend most of my day glued to a 2.5" by 4.5" screen for most hours of the day, except for 2 hours of suspiciously poor selections of sports - like boxing - between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. I've watched the incredible success of the Malaysian divers and badminton players, the fortunes of the mostly China-Chinese-but-now-Singaporean paddlers, and a lot of netball.

I'm going netball-crazy, I now have aspirations of making the national team. Netballers don't retire all that young and I think that gives me about 10 years to get into it. The last time I was so strongly inspired was after watching Fame which left me thinking, I want to dance. I can still hear my mum, "Dancing is such a sleazy job."

Anyway, so while being forced to watch the British nations in every sport they have half a chance in, i.e. boxing, bowls, and badminton, I clicked on the article bearing the title "Are you born to swim, do you have the body for swimming", and was horribly dismayed.

Key characteristics as listed by Dr. Kevin Thompson, physiologist at EIS, are wide shoulders, slim hips, large hands and feet, large arm girth, and high arm span to height ratio.

Wide shoulders. Okay, yea I have pretty wide shoulders. Okay, fine, very wide.

Slim hips. No way, these hips are built for breeding.

Large hands and feet. Um, I don't think so, I cannot palm a netball and I take after my dad in shoe size.

Large arm girth. I don't really know what this means to be honest, where are they measuring around? Forearms? Upper arms? At 14 years old, I was doing endurance sets of bicep curls, tricep curls, and obliques with 5 to 10kg. At 21, I can barely lift three, much less repetitively.

High arm span to height ratio. I know for a fact that my arms are disproportionately short. Louis Tan kindly pointed that out to me during a squash session about three years ago.

So no, I'm not built to swim. Damn.

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