When we got married I don’t remember any discussion about a pre-nup. Maybe Australian lawyers were yet to discover that such a thing existed. We may have had some system where the bride and groom agreed beforehand on who would get to keep the family heirloom convict ball and chain but other than that we just said “I do” and got on with things, albeit with our fingers crossed. So you might think I’m joking when I say there’s a clause in our pre-nup that says if any of our kids inherit my husband’s athletic prowess then he’s the one who gets to drive them to early morning training.

My husband was a slightly hyper-active five year old and during the summer of 1977 his mother decided to enroll him in swimming lessons in an effort to get him to burn off some of that energy. There was a coach on the pool deck who noticed PJ had a good strong kick and suggested to his mother that he might have some natural talent. By the time he was eight years old he was competing in local races. I met him at high school in year eight (junior year) but already knew him as that guy who won all the events at the school swimming carnival by half a length. Of the pool. I’m not just bragging, he was really good. At the pinnacle of his career he was ranked in the top ten in our country for three different events, was all set to compete in the Olympic Trials, and was considering an offer of a swimming scholarship to a college in North America. OK I’m bragging, but it’s all true. The story doesn’t have a happy ending, unfortunately. He developed tendonitis in his shoulder and at the age of 18 he had to give it all away. If only…

His father was a champion sprinter in his heyday in England, his mother an accomplished horse-rider, so there’s something in the genes on his side of the family that make them good at sports. We have been watching both our daughters closely to see if they’re going to be champion sprinters or Olympic swimmers but up until a couple of years ago neither seemed all that excited about either. Which is fine, of course. I was a very content but fairly ordinary netball player and cross-country runner when I was at school. I was a mediocre saxophonist and a lousy bagpiper. But that’s another story.

At the end of Ella’s first year of school we started to notice that she had quite extraordinary muscle definition for a child of six. Her arms looked like they had been sculpted and her back muscles positively rippled as she struggled with getting her school uniform on over her head in the morning. We couldn’t figure out how she had developed such a physique until one day I watched her on the jungle-gym in the playground at school. She was swinging from one end of the frame to the other, pausing every so often in a chin-up to let the other kids past. Then she would jump off and run across to the fireman’s pole and scale it in half a second flat. And suddenly I realised - this kid is actually a monkey. You know how some parents will say “Jimmy, go get your violin and play a little Chopin for the nice visitors”? Well, we’d say “Hey, Ella, show everyone your biceps!” and she would roll up her sleeves and do an Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One year later and we signed both the kids up for the local swim club, a very informal Friday night/Sunday morning commitment that included one session of training and one session of just-for-fun racing. The junior kids’ coach greeted Ella with a hearty “Well hello there, Muscles!” and that’s when I knew she definitely was a bit of a freak. She leapt into the water and proceeded to splash around and to her best impression of a Japanese tourist caught in a rip at Bondi Beach. It was enthusiastic, but it wasn’t pretty. She might have had the physique but she lacked the coordination.

This summer we enrolled the girls again at swim club. Madeleine took to it with characteristic determination and has developed a lovely freestyle technique. She can certainly swim further than me. Ella reluctantly joined the little kids’ group. If you asked her she’d probably tell you that the only reason she’s doing swimming at all is because the parents cook pancakes for the kids after the Sunday morning lesson. But this year something seems to have switched on in her head. A couple of Sundays ago I took a break from flipping pancakes to watch her in the pool.

The kid has a hell of a kick. She absolutely powers through the water, and I have to walk at a reasonable pace as I follow her alongside on the pool deck. I’m not just bragging. OK, yes I am. But there’s no denying that Ella is the one who has inherited the necessary genetic makeup to possibly excel at swimming and so PJ and I have been discussing the logistics of getting her to training at 5am, six mornings a week.

PJ’s mother took him to training every morning for ten years. She got up, drove him to the pool, came home and went back to sleep for a while, then went back to the pool to pick him up, then came home and got herself ready for work. Can you imagine? It was dark when they left, and during winter at least it was still dark when they got back. It’s quite a commitment, being the parent of an elite athlete. Getting the kids to school every morning is hard enough without factoring in training sessions that start well before the crack of dawn. Add to this the fact that we are about to realise our dream of moving out of the city and onto a rural acreage - forty minutes from the nearest swimming club - and we’re wondering if we, let alone she, has what it takes to be a serious swimmer.

She is only seven years old. I’m getting ahead of myself. She might not want to do it. She might be happy just swingin’ from the jungle gym. But what if she discovers a natural talent for something like this, something that requires a lot of hard work? I’m all for encouraging my kids to try their hand at anything. At the moment they do karate and horse-riding, and swimming will give way to winter sports (netball for Madeleine, soccer for Ella) and I’ll keep driving them to their classes as long as they’re happy to go (which they are, in case you were wondering that I might be one of those scary Stage Mother types). But if Ella takes to swimming the way her Dad did, or Madeleine develops on obsession for dressage and show-jumping like her grandmother, do I have the energy and time and commitment to keep up?

I hope so. I think so. Yeah, of course I do. I might need to start getting into training myself though. And by ‘training’ I mean setting the alarm for 4am and practicing operating my espresso machine whilst my eyes are still firmly shut.

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