My fourth-period class of my first trimester of school was called “ENS 1”. Like math, you might be questioning what an “ENS” is, because it’s not a commonly used term for a class. Even if you google it, you get back something Crypto Related.
ENS actually stands for Exercise and Nutritional Science. In other words, it’s a health and PE class. There are certain days of the week which correspond to an activity we will do on that day which always falls into a Health or PE category. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we had the PE category. The Health stuff happened on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For the most part, we followed this schedule very well with a small number of exceptions.
Let’s start by talking about the PE days. Most PE days start with everyone going into the locker room and changing into the PE clothes. The PE clothes stuff is taken quite seriously by the coaches so you do need to be careful to remember to bring it. Those who forget are typically at a high risk of losing points for the day which would obviously not be ideal. Once we have finished changing, we have to get out of the locker room and head out to a designated spot where our class meets. Once we get to that designated spot, we have to wait for the coach to come by and take attendance. Normally the coaches wait a little bit for the slower people to change so there are a good three or four minutes to do whatever you want before the coach comes. A lot of people just spend their time trying to do pull-ups on the pull-up bar, some start wrestling each other until they die, it’s just really chaotic and hard to describe. This particular trimester, my ENS class was quiet, but wait until we get to ENS 2. It’s like a madhouse! After this, we headed to our sport.
I’m gonna start by addressing the elephant in the room: swim. Everyone hates swimming. Period. I don’t know a single person in that ENS class that genuinely wanted to swim. It’s the least popular sport, the most demanding, and it counted for a pretty big chunk of our grade. I’m actually one of the few people who enjoy swim since it’s what I’m better at, and a lot of the good swimmers have the same mentality as well.
On the first day of swim, the entire class was split into two groups: Lane 1 Swimmers and regular swimmers. They put us through a test to see if we could swim a length of the pool completely on our own, and if we passed that test, we were allowed to swim in the deeper parts of the pool (which went as deep as 13 feet!). This test shouldn’t scare you since the part of the pool we swam in for the test is only a few feet deep and it’s only one length of the pool. Those who pass the test move to the deeper lanes for more rigorous swimming. This part of the pool is around 7 or 8 feet deep and everyone who passed the test went to this lane. I’d say about ⅔ of the class was able to make it past the test.
Those who didn’t make it through the test are marked as “Lane 1” swimmers, and they stay in the singular 3 foot deep lane for less intense drils. I don’t really know everything that they do since I passed the test, but from what my friends tell me it’s basically just the same as Regular Swim. The only big difference is that the part of the pool they swim in is shallow, so you have a bit more wiggle room.
Most of the swim we did wasn’t so bad. (Okay, granted, I was the best one there, but he was quite lenient with swim and gave us plenty of breaks) We mostly just swam small intervals of 50s and 100s and occasionally they were timed. I’m currently planning to try out for the swim team once the tryouts start (At the time I’m writing this in December of 2023, the tryouts still won’t happen for a month) I mostly timed mine to check how quick I was. (If you’re wondering, my best 100 freestyle right now is 1:26… which from what I’ve heard might be enough to make JV?) (Note from a few months later: It was enough, I’m on the swim team…. article for that coming eventually)
We did two types of swim assessments over the course of the trimester. These are certainly the most rigorous part of the swim field, and even I want to pass out after doing them. The first type of swim assessment is called the 6-minute swim. In a 6-minute-swim, they put on a timer of 6 minutes and make us swim as many laps as we can in that time (1 lap = a 25, one length of the pool). We did two of these over the course of the trimester. I got a total of 12 laps the first assessment, and the second one I almost got 14. I typically just sprint all six minutes of the swim, and that usually allows me to get decent times, but nearly kills me as I get out of the pool.
But by far the hardest part of the swim is the Snake Assessment. Seriously, even for me it’s quite difficult and that’s true even if I’m not going full force. The Snake Assessment starts when you’re on one side of the pool (typically we start on the deepest end) and you swim one 25 to the other side of the pool. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? But then they make you go to the next lane and do another 25 in the opposite direction. Then you go to the lane after that and do another 25 in the opposite direction again. And then they make you do this all the way across the pool until you’ve done every single lane up until the Lane 1 swimmers. I’m not kidding, you’re probably swimming a 300. If you’re a decently fit or a good swimmer then this doesn’t scare you and the swim on its own actually doesn’t scare me as much as I thought it would. What made this really tough for me was when they made you climb out of the pool every 25 you did, which was like murder on my tiny arms (at least I had an opportunity to practice dives). The worst swim exam he ever did was when he made us do two of these Snakes.
I’ll admit, by the end of two snakes I got pretty tired, but I still had some fun with it. I allowed about 15 people in the class to go ahead of me first before going in myself. Then I passed everyone who was ahead of me, making it to 2nd place by the end of the first snake. When I walked back to the deep end with the 1st place kid to start the second snake, he just let me go ahead, realizing I wouldn’t stay behind for long. So yeah, I do go on a very extravagant path when it comes to swim. But I really only have swim to do the extravagant path on in this class, because I suck at literally everything else in ENS.
One of the things we did is football. I sucked at that! Typically, I just stood as the one who occasionally catches the ball and throws it two seconds later. I only did good enough to the point where I could maybe survive so I don’t really have much to brag about there. We also did volley tennis… which I also sucked at.
The last part of ENS is the Health area. This area mostly covered things surrounding mental health. It discussed a lot about decision making, mental illnesses, and started to get into our physical health when it talked about diets. We had to do several projects on mental health throughout the trimester under this class. There isn’t too much for me to say about this now, but when we get to ENS 2, you better be ready, because that’s when all the fun stuff like smoking and sex comes in.
In conclusion, ENS 1 is great if you like sports, health, and swimming. If you don’t like it… well suck it up, because ENS is compulsory.