Hi, I wanted to share my story ever since I came across this subreddit because swimming has meant a lot and is still very important to me. This will be quite a long read, and I’m grateful to anyone who reads until the end. I’m 17F, and I’ve decided to return to swimming. Competitively. For background context, I’ve been swimming since I was 5 and training competitively until I was 11. I never reached national times, but I did compete a lot, and my coach classified me as an endurance type of swimmer rather than a sprinter. But I grew up to hate swimming back then because I wouldn’t win anything no matter how often and hard I practiced. That really demotivated me to continue, seeing my other friends who managed to qualify for nationals because they switched clubs and I couldn’t. At a young age, I knew my family wasn’t financially comfortable, and I didn’t want to burden my parents with the expenses it takes to raise an athlete, so I quit before junior high school. And honestly? I cried tears of joy when I did.…