One of my all-time favorite childhood book series is the Ant & Bee collection by Angela Banner. I’ve known them by heart for decades now, but some days I have to re-read one for the millionth time because something happening in my life makes me think of a particular story.
Over the past winter, I was thinking a lot about Ant & Bee and The Doctor. (Bee catches a cold. A model patient, Bee bounces back quickly. Then Ant catches a more serious illness, a virus, and must be quarantined for a month. He is not such a good patient. I am sure you can see where this is headed — I am most certainly more Ant-like.)
Lately though, I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite book from the series, Ant & Bee and the Secret a lot. In this book, Bee initially proves to be better than Ant at several activities — hopscotch, jump rope and story-telling. Each time, Bee makes fun of Ant’s efforts and calls Ant “stupid.”
Of course, Ant becomes “cross” and runs away. Except that when he eventually comes back, suddenly Ant is better than Bee at whatever game they were playing earlier. Ultimately Ant’s mystery is solved with the help of Kind Dog (Bee deliberately makes Ant feel stupid so he can have Kind Dog “track” Ant as soon as he runs off.) Ant’s “secrect” turns out to be school.
I think this book is on my mind so much lately because I feel like Ant in a way. I was cross with my old training situation so I ran off to swim with kids under a new coach. Thanks to my new enviornment and Coach Mark, I’m learning something new at every practice. In another month or two (epecially when I have more strength to apply to my strokes — right now I am kind of wiped out a lot from juggling swimming, weights paddling and running) I think I’m going to startle swimmers I haven’t trained with for awhile.
Yep, lots of technique changes take time to assimilate into “automatic and with speed,” but I’m starting to get “aha!” flashes here and there at practice now…yay!
Until next time,
Rebecca, swim evangelist