Assignment 10: Elana Ehl

Heights. They don't bother me much if I know that I am safe or I have experienced it before.
No matter what you do in life there is always a next level to get to, whether it be getting a raise, finishing a goal, or trying something new. Unfortunately mine was the latter.
A lot of people cannot even fathom jumping from three stories in the air into a giant cavity of water, now imagine doing that backwards. Lets add another twist to the story: jump backward but flip back towards the platform you are jumping from. Scary right? I thought so too.
To divers the act of jumping backwards but rotating towards the board/ platform is known as the inward category. And let me tell you from personal experience, it is incredibly scary.
During one practice my coach decided that I was ready to take my simple inward dive to the tallest platform. 10 meters. I had done dives on the 10 meter platform before, but all the dives I had done  were facing and flipping forwards. So when I heard my coach say to me "take it up to 10," I immediately paled and became wide eyed. I had never been so scared of a dive that I would not even go up to the end of the platform but I had met my match. After tremendous encouragement from my teammates I finally willed myself to stand backwards on the end of 10 meter, with only the balls of my feet on the platform and my arms extending straight above my head. I was in the starting position, now all I needed to do was go. But I couldn't. All I could do was think about all that could go wrong: I could not line up my arms properly and break my wrists, I could injure my shoulders for the same reason, I could injure my back if I was not tight enough going in the water, I could hit the platform if I jumped to straight up, I could hit the lane-line and possibly a swimmer if i babied it and jumped out, I could rotate too much and make the dive short of vertical, knocking the air out of me, if the air got knocked out of me I could drown, if I over rotated from vertical I would smack my back and possibly injure it. This all went through my head in the period it took me to drag myself out of the pool and up to 10 meter platform, from 10 meter platform to the end, and finally of the platform doing the dive.
It took me a good 20 minutes to finally go, but I did it eventually.