Swimming can easily be forgotten as a sport that requires a lot of hard training and dedication unless you are constantly thinking about Michael Phelps which is completely acceptable to do. While I never swam on a high school team (because my school did not have a team until junior year and it conflicted with volleyball season), and I did not end up getting a swimming scholarship after high school like some of my peers, I did swim on a team in the summers from the age of 9 to 17. Granted the team was not super competitive, but I learned a lot about efficiency in the sport and tricks to training.
When I was in third grade, a friend of mine suggested that I join the swim team in the upcoming summer. I denied because the thought of diving into shallow water really worried me. When I talked to my mom about it, she told me that the coaches would teach me how to dive so that I didn’t hurt myself and apparently that was enough convincing for me.
I showed up to practice at 9 am and hopped in the freezing water and did whatever the coaches told me to do. They must have been impressed with something I did because once practice was over, the head coach asked me to come to the earlier session at 8 am the next day. I was really nervous because I knew that all of the older kids practiced in the early sessions, but I came anyway. I slowly moved up the lanes (which showed that I was increasing in speed) and made a couple friends.
For the next 8 years, I dragged my tired butt to the pool every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning from the beginning of June to the end of July. I was always tired, grouchy, and questioning why I ever signed myself up for such an early event until I got in the water. I was almost always the first to dive into the water and the second I did, I felt energized. I would lift my head and see the clear blue water and I felt like I could train for the Olympics (don’t get too excited, that is not where this story is going).
But not every day was an hour-long synchronized dance in the clean blue pool water. There were some days that the water didn’t warm up after the first ten minutes… or half hour, or 45 minutes. There were some days that I would get out of bed and ride my bike to the pool through the cold just to find out that it was legally too cold to get in the water and the coaches had decided that we were going to have a dry-land practice. The whole hour was filled with runs around the park and crab-walking around the 25-meter pool. Another good one was when we spent the whole practice swimming a mile. No stops, no breaks, just swimming. It just so happened that it takes almost perfectly an hour to swim 36 laps, but only if you swim fast enough. Some days, the whole point of the practice was to decrease the amount of breaths that we took while we swam. In the logistics of the sport, this makes sense. The less time you took to breathe, the more time you spent swimming, and the faster you swam. But in the logistics of life, you need air to live. Life didn’t seem to matter to our coaches, so we spent the whole hour not breathing. I have yet to encounter another sport where you can hear coaches yelling at you, “Don’t breathe!”
None of what I have mentioned so far was as bad as butterfly day. The coaches would dedicate a whole day of practice to each of the four strokes; freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. The worst by far was always the butterfly. The stroke itself is an invention from hell. It works every single muscle in your body and exhausts them before you finish half of the length of the pool. Spending a whole practice on this stroke was equivalent to a death sentence.
So why did I swim for 8 years? Mostly because I couldn’t stop. Every year my mom would ask me if I wanted to swim again and I wouldn’t be able to picture myself waking up at a decent hour in the morning or not feeling the rush of cold as I dive in the water or the smile that I couldn’t ever hold back as I push off the wall to start a backstroke race. Swimming was constant work, but it was something that I loved to hate. I now swim at the gym on my college campus. As I use the kickboard, I can look out the window and see the DePaul church and sometimes I think about how strange it is that that sport brought me to this pool.
