Gainer attempt 2194. That is how many attempts it took me to do a gainer. I do diving in the summer. 99.99 percent of the time, I do it with my friends. The beginning of my diving career was interesting: From staying in the sun for 12 hours or to sitting on the grass contemplating my life choices and not wanting to hurt my back from belly-flopping. I have a friend who went through the same experience. His name is Finley Laurence and he is my best friend. Finley and I both swim for New Canaan Caimans. In the summer, we have morning practices from 5 am to 8 am. For those that do not swim, the pool temperature at 5 am is very inconsistent. It can sometimes feel like a jacuzzi or can feel like  -10 degrees, but no matter what, we had to jump in. Our diving flips were progressing pretty fast. Each day, we would try a new trick. Oftentimes, we would go over to my house and be searching for new tricks on YouTube. We would type into the search bar “cool tricks” that were gnarly. We scrolled for a solid ten seconds, then we saw it - the gainer, a reverse front flip. I was instantly hooked on learning it. Off the deep end, I went, attempting to learn the gainer.

The next morning, we started to attempt the new trick. Finley had a spectacular idea - we count each attempt it takes us to do the flip. In the first couple hundred attempts, we did not see any improvement whatsoever. The first ten attempts I was just jumping and back flopping. I belly-flopped a lot more than back-flopped. It doesn’t really hurt, at least the first 100 attempts. I noticed doing the actual movement isn’t hard, but mentally something was blocking me. Throwing myself backward next to the diving board is terrifying. Every time I jumped, I had an image in my mind of something going wrong. In my mind, I had an image of a teammate who tried a backflip and hit her head on the diving board. Even though she ended up okay, watching her climb out of the water with a bloody head, stuck with me.

As I pulled myself back to reality and shook that image from my head, I thought about my own confidence. Confidence is something I wish I had more of while diving. Even the slightest bit of confidence would have helped. I climbed up onto the diving board. I thought to myself, another jump, another attempt at my flip. I walked across the diving board to make sure no little humans were there, so I didn't crush them while I’m doing my flip. There was a small little kid trying to get to the wall because he just did a pencil dive. I tilted to my left, and I saw the beautiful sky in the corner of my eye. I also saw Finley looking like a dog slurping up the soda from lunch. As I looked toward him, I took a couple of small steps backward to go to the other side of the board. Then it happened. This might sound cliche but my life flashed before my eyes. It was not scary or fun. I had no emotions besides laughter. It was quite embarrassing. How could I fallen off a diving board onto the cement that is only a meter-high? Luckily, I fell chest first. The lifeguards immediately came to me and asked if I was ok. I said,” Yes” but I didn't think I would be ok. I hurt my fingers and I felt like my lungs collapsed. I’m ok physically but I didn't think I would recover fully because, in the back of my mind, I will always remember it. 

A couple of months later, it was the morning of August 2, 2021. I forced myself to continue to try my attempts at the gainer. It was attempt 2194. Finley was encouraging me to keep on going. We were both hyping each other up. Then it happened. Bounce, bounce, swoosh. I had finally done the gainer. I was so happy. I had finally done the flip and after all of my perseverance; I had done it. I learned from this experience that friendship is important and they make you thrive. I also learned that you should never give up on something you want to do if you have your mind set on it.  I learned from my experience of diving that you have to persevere through getting hurt and throwing yourself next to a diving board.