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The time is five o'clock A.M. The sky ripples in a deep, velvety
black as I race across the pool deck, tugging my unruly hair into
a latex swim cap. The frigid wind bites into my nearly bare body;
the icy deck numbs my toes as I adjust my goggles over weary eyes.
I glance about, feeling the warmth of comradeship as my eyes light
on the four others who have made the effort this morning. With a
deep sigh of resignation, my body launches into an arch, convulsing
slightly at the initial shock of the crisp, eerie blue water. Forced
awake, I automatically begin the powerful strokes of my warm-up,
preparing myself for the first of the day's two training sessions
that will test the physical strength and mental tenacity of each
athlete who dares make the attempt.
Day in and day out it is the same routine; if you want to be great,
if you one day want to be ranked among the few who can call themselves
the best, you must maintain a lifestyle that nears insanity. Commuting
time not included, swim training eats up anywhere from 20 to 24
hours of your week, possibly more, depending on the coach. Not even
illness, weather, or holidays are allowed to interfere with your
training schedule: unless you are vomiting or feverish you drag
your protesting body to practice; unless lightning threatens your
life you endure whatever nature hurls in your way; if something
as inconsiderate as Christmas causes you to take a day off, you
make up the training you missed, perhaps by adding another round
of doubles to your week.
Athletes vying for the coveted label of “the best” all face grim
circumstances and sacrifice. The unfortunate high school student
has a structured school schedule to contend with, translated into
required school hours and nightly class work. Life becomes a fearful
experience of day to day survival: directly after school comes practice,
so homework isn’t started until 7:30 at night. If this sounds like
a simple inconvenience, the factor of morning practice has been
forgotten. Swimmers rise for practice anywhere between 4:00 and
4:30 in the silent darkness of early morning. They are lucky to
snatch five hours of sleep on the eve of a double practice day.
The other days they cannot make up the sleep they have lost because
they must finish the homework they couldn't complete the night before.
There is always a Saturday morning practice as well, so the only
time a swimmer obtains a decent amount of sleep is Saturday night.
Training itself is rigorous and painful, both on the body and
on the mind. It involves a demanding combination of dryland exercises
and two hours of pool time per training session. People have hinted
swimming to be a boring sport, swimming -- up and back along a black
line -- for all eternity. These critics cannot be any more wrong.
Swimming requires more thought and focus than many of the common
sports others play. True, you don't contend with a ball, nor do
you need to devise strategies and plays involving other people.
But what makes it so difficult is the overwhelming emphasis on technique:
forcing your body to move in just the perfect way to minimize resistance
in the water and maximize the power of your stroke. There are four
different strokes in swimming, and for each stroke you must consider
a multitude of tiny factors: where is your hand entering the water?
how is your body positioned? are your elbows bent enough on the
catch? are they bent too much? are you over-reaching? are you dragging
your hips? are you rotating enough? and so many more. Resistance
through water is a factor that is much more significant than resistance
through air, and any little error can add tenths that build up over
the course of a race. You must feel where your body is in relationship
to the water, and there is always, always something you are doing
incorrectly. Swimming becomes an intricate dance of perfecting one
thing and discovering another that is flawed. Even the best in the
world, the Olympians and world record holders, are forever looking
for minute adjustments in their technique to drop mere hundredths
from their times.
This quest for perfection involves endless repetition of unimaginable
drills to discover the right niche for each athlete. You must always
be thinking about what you are doing, feeling each element, to detect
the flaws. At the same time you must be thinking about starts, turns,
finishes, pacing, and racing. You must be smart to be a swimmer.
Then you must take what you feel in the drills and apply it to
the actual sets.
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Coaches develop sets that are tailored to match the swimmer and
the swimmer’s needs. The sprint freestyler, for example, does not
do the same workout as the distance IMer. The breastroker does not
do the same workout as the butterflyer, who does not do the same
workout as the distance freestyler, and so on. But no matter which
group you fit into, sets are devised to be arduous affairs. You
must push yourself to your limit, and then push past that, over
and over again, in every training session you face.
You must always force yourself on, performing whatever your coach
tells you to do. You never pause to consider disobeying: if he says
to swim faster, you swim faster. The response is automatic; you
listen, you doggedly nod, and you launch yourself off the wall,
hurling your will into the set. Swimmers suffer some of the most
pain imaginable, for their whole body is consistently subjected
to the wrath of the pool. After some training sessions your body
is so beat up that you walk into your living room and drop dead
on the floor. No muscle group escapes use in swimming. You tighten
up in pain, force your way through sheer physical exhaustion; yet
the dedicated punch through the breaking point and continue on,
knowing that this is what it takes to be the best.
At times you work so hard that you simply become numb to the pain;
you are aware that you can barely lift your protesting arms out
of the water, and that your legs feel like solid granite, but you
no longer detect your screaming body. Few ever reach this point;
they begin to feel the rising surge of pain and back off, afraid.
Hence the mental toughness and desire come into play, for you must
defeat the mind games you begin to play with yourself. You cannot
ponder whether you can go on; you must decide to go on, and if you
do, you discover the beautiful, liberating feeling of realization
that you can do anything.
Swimming is a cruel sport. You can train with all your heart and
soul for a year and, just before the important meet, fall ill. Or
at that one meet you can have a single poor performance due to a
large amount of details that could go wrong. Or you can get a devastating
injury, the most common being one to the shoulder. To come back
from injury is a difficult journey in itself, and one that defines
a person’s character. Then there is the unfairness of the sport:
the hardest workers and most deserving are not always the ones that
reap the glory. Talent is just as great a factor in swimming as
it is in anything else, and those that have it do not always realize
the potency of their gift. An athlete may give her life to swimming
and still never be as great as another, born with the natural gift,
who gives only 70% to the sport. Swimming can give the highest pinnacle
of joy and elation in success, but it can also bestow the most crushing
misery and devastation in failure. Both are decided by mere seconds
or less.
So why do you do it? friends ask me. Why do you do go through
all that? Are you crazy or something? Maybe I am. But they don't
understand, they can't understand swimming in the way that I do.
I do it because I love it, more than anything the world can offer.
Even in the middle of the most painful training sessions, performed
on little sleep, with my body begging for relief, I am content to
be where I am. I have been through the darkest hours of the anger
and frustration of injury, wondering desperately if I would ever
return to the pool. I have been broken down by the demands of the
sport to be built back up again. I have cried in disappointment
and doubt when I failed to perform as well as I expected to after
months of the above described. Yet always am I drawn back to the
glittering, blue water, ready to face another day.
I love swimming for what it is, a sport that represents all that
is right in athletics. There are no judges to determine whether
you are a superior athlete than the next girl. No coach can make
a call as to where you will play, how much you will play, and how
important you are to a team. The person to get their hand on the
wall the fastest is the winner, whether you like that person or
not. The clock does not lie.
To many, swimming is just another sport, or a fun activity. Yet
only those on the inside of the swimming world really understand
what this sport is about. I love the people involved in swimming,
for we all know what we go through, in the pool and out. Even those
who aren't willing to push themselves as far as others have an appreciation
and give their admiration and respect to those who do. We are always
immediate friends because of the bonds we share; because we know
what it is to be consumed by a sport that makes us whole, and to
want something so badly that we will do whatever it takes to get
there. And that feeling of glory, that feeling of performing excellently
after everything has gone right, is the most beautiful, indescribable
feeling in human experience. No matter how rare, that is what we
live for, and I could never give it up.
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