Toeing the start line of the Mashpee Superswim, Violet Birenbaum clocked she was one of the few teenagers gearing up for the one-mile race.
“It wasn’t very competitive, but I noticed I was one of the few younger kids,” she said. “I was nervous about that.”
At 12 years old, Birenbaum was the youngest competitor at the June 13 event in Mashpee. Still, the sixth-grader at Chenery Upper Elementary School held her own, swimming one mile in 32 minutes, 7 seconds. She was one of seven competitors in a division of 30 swimmers who were 16 or younger, including one 13-year-old, two 15-year-olds and three 16-year-olds.
“I was very nervous,” Birenbaum said.
While she loves swimming, she didn’t love the idea of what lurked beneath the surface of an open body of water like a pond or ocean.
Currently a member of the Belmont Aquatics Team and the Recreation Department’s Belmont Dolphins Swim Team, Birenbaum trained for the Superswim largely through workouts with her teammates.
“In my club swim team, we do a lot of long distances,” she said. “I do it five days a week. I got a lot done there.”
The young athlete wasn’t always a long-distance swimmer — she worked her way up to it with shorter distances before regularly swimming the 500-meter race.
“I love how I can just think about what I’m doing … versus when I’m sprinting, I don’t have a lot of time to think about my technique and my breath,” she said.
More comfortable in the pool than in the open water, the race posed different challenges than Birenbaum was used to. The waves made breathing more challenging, spot-checking was more work, and the depth meant she couldn’t see the floor below her. She also didn’t love the idea of animals, like fish, swimming around.
“I swallowed a lot of water,” she said. “There’s also a lot more people than I was expecting … There were always people around me, which honestly made me feel more safe.”
On the flip side, pools mean flip-turns at the end of each lap, and those can be tiring.
At the end of the mile, though, she had accomplished her longest race yet.
“It felt, honestly, like I accomplished something big, which I did, and it felt so good,” Birenbaum said. “I don’t know why I was so stressed about it.”
Would she do it again? Absolutely.
“It was really fun,” she said.
Birenbaum has plans to swim in high school, and maybe even in college. After all, swimming has always been part of her life.
“I’ve actually been swimming since I was an infant,” she said. “When I lived in Miami, it was a big part of my life … and I just stuck with it.”