Hello to all my lovely followers. I know I have been away for awhile but with very good reason! I teamed up with the Michael Phelps Swimming in India to teach swim lessons. What does this mean traveling across the globe and calling Mumbai home for the last two months? The experience taught me so many things beyond swimming. I would like to give you all a peek into the whole experience I had in and out of the pool. So I will take this blog to talk about the main reason I was there: swim lessons and work. I will follow up with one or two blogs about the experience I had beyond the pool, but if this is the only blog you read, I strongly encourage you to visit India. it is a lovely country with kind and beautiful people.

So the primary reason I was in Mumbai was to teach swim lessons. I taught under a program similar to that of the Red Cross. We taught kids three and up all the way to adults. We taught various skills from floating, kicking, and freestyle, and if you were at a high enough level the course included lessons on all four strokes. Seeing the joy of the kids at their swimming experience brought me so much happiness. I can say that I am very grateful for this unique experience.

We worked a lot, waking up at 5:30 in the morning. We would then teach until about 11:00 and then we returned home for an afternoon refuel and a nap. My first session was at 7:30 so I had to leave early in the morning, at about 6:30. Mumbai traffic is crazy terrible, like it takes an hour to get to some places that are 20 minutes away, so we had to leave early and do our best to be on time for our clients. After a nap we had a second session, hopping back in the car to do it all over again with a new set of clients at a different pool. Throughout the time we were there, we traveled to a variety of facilities.

I worked at a golf club with a pool. I also worked at several luxury apartment complexes that had outdoor pools as a part of the complex. Aside from the beautiful apartment complex, we had parents and kids who valued the time we spent with them, feeling like we were giving them a gift. A business trip is always a lot more work than vacation, but I would say it was well worth it. If you’re interested in seeing more, check out my footage from some of my lessons on my instagram page at Swimphilly_ or my Facebook page: Swimphilly.