Keifer Duong

Balancing time and extracurriculars was a struggle for me growing up. I have been competitively swimming for over twelve years, starting in the first grade. My life up until the first year of high school, consisted of waking up, going to school, swimming for two hours, then going back to sleep to repeat my day. On average, I would dedicate twelve hours a week toward swimming, leaving hardly any time for social gatherings, However, even though I ended up spending many hours on swimming, it eventually paid off. At the age of twelve, I achieved an amazing feat, earning the title of state champion for the 200 breaststroke event. On top of this, I was nationally ranked 4th for this event in the United States. This was shocking to me, as I swam with people around me who were much faster than me.

Even though I achieved this, striking a balance between swimming, school, and a social life was something I struggled with. I had no free time in middle school as there was an abundance of homework. It was difficult to do the homework during school as there were many activities, in addition to there being multiple quizzes and tests a week to study for. Eventually, I was tired of swimming. In the first year of high school, I started to dwindle down the time I had for swimming, cutting it from twelve hours to eight hours a week. My skills started to deteriorate, but I gained more free time.

I started to gain new hobbies. One of these many hobbies that I still have today is trying out new restaurants with friends and family. In the picture, shows myself in a restaurant called Norifish. It is a Japanese place that has omakase, where the chef decides to pick foods for you to eat. They served me all kinds of fish including tuna, otoro, and eel. Currently, I think that this place is one of the best restaurants I have been to.

Because of swimming, I had learned an important skill that would stick with me to this day, time management. I was so used to having 2-3 hours of my day gone because of swimming, leading me to plan every hour of my day after school. However, after I started to stop, I had a lot of free time to spend with other people as well as having enough time to balance my school work. Swimming has been a part of my life for so many years, but most importantly it has taught me many life lessons.