I love to swim. It was one of my favorite summer experiences. I also love to dive, but don’t do it so much anymore. My best friend and sister Suzi taught me how to do jackknife dive. I loved it. Then we would dive in different ways and make up names for them. My brothers always came up with the funniest. I loved slicing the water with a dive, going down and then stretching, reaching and gliding underneath the surface and then pick up speed to swim to the other side of the pool on one breath. I had the wonderful experience in 1976 while at USC to watch many of the swimmers practice that ended up on the 76 Olympic Swimming Team. John Nabors was amazing. The Women’s swimming and diving events at the Olympics are some of my favorites.

Yes. It’s one of the best exercises.

As a young girl, I was totally into sports — but swimming was the love of my life. My high school yearbook, I remember, had beside my name “championship swimmer”. I trained in backstroke - with my dream the Olympics. At the time, there were two roads to greatness — the Santa Clara Swim Club in California or training in Canada year round. No other. I was breaking all the records in high school and the beginning of college in freestyle and backstoke — so perhaps the saddest moment in my life when my mother told me that there was not money enough for the full-time training elsewhere. I knew in my heart — for both cost large fortunes. And so I swam on my own in every large pool I could find, competing with my own past times and surpassing them into my forties as I dreamed of what might have been. The sadness is still with me - but some things are not meant to be. Others come along and - in different ways - have their own rewards. . and in retrospect, they may be not only bigger but better.

Can I swim well? No! Do I hate to get my hair wet? Yes!