One of my biggest pet peeves is when I am talking to someone who does not swim, and they say, ”swimming is an easy sport.” dead serious.  The reason that this gets on my nerves so much is that I have been swimming since I was six years old for the swim team, taking a break somewhere after seventh grade, and not a single time did I think to myself, “Ah yes, swimming is easy.” I have been swimming for longer than most people have been playing their main sports on land! I guess the reason that this gets me agitated is that the people who say this are almost certainly not as athletic as I am, and just plain ignorant of the fact that swimming is a full-body workout that may not look difficult from on the deck. 

However, what the average person cannot see from the pool deck is the struggle, devotion, and pain that the swimmer experiences on a daily basis in order to accomplish their goals and win events. I am a highly sociable person, but I soon remove myself from a conversation that makes me agitated just because it is no longer enjoyable to talk to that person and I would rather just leave rather than have my sport of swimming looked down upon by people who would not survive a quarter of practice without nearly drowning. Try doing a 200 fly! Ignorance. False confidence. Know it alls. All of these are what it takes for a nonswimmer to say that swimming is easy without any experience of in-water competition. I know that, to the average person, this horrid offense would seem like just a person expressing their opinion, but to me, it is much worse! They do not know what they are saying. It is as if a caterpillar was trying to give a butterfly tips on how to fly. It does not make sense.