People seem to only get excited when swimming is showing on TV. This past year the Olympics were held and every social media platform was buzzing about Michael Phelps competing in his final races and Katie Ledecky breaking another world record. Once the Olympics were over, everything calmed down again and returned to the weekly buzz of football stats and memes. People give swimmers a lot of slack, stating that we do a simple sport when in fact we don't. Imagine this, we train doubles, do cross training, and we have no idea what an off-season is.
Most swimmers can be found training every day of the year. It doesn't help that we are in a sport that requires us to be in the water all of the time otherwise we lose the "feel" of the water and it brings a whole new meaning to being in shape for our sport. Many of us do doubles throughout much of the year, with most of the heavy training while we are in school. We are perfectionists and set high standards for ourselves. We want to excel in our classes and in our sport. Doing only the minimum will kill us. We want to do great things and dream big because that is what our sport begs us to do to get to the next level. We take on a lot of extracurriculars, as if doing doubles is not enough. We feel the need to be president of SGA, co-chair of Cru, along with striving for that 4.0.
Swimming begs for meticulous attention to detail. Something as minor as the placement of the hands into the water and how we rotate our body to get a breath needs to be focused on. We become very aware of how our body feels and if something is wrong. We know when we are getting sick and when we overdid our shoulder. The crazy thing is, we train through it like it is nothing. We have to. It is not in our chlorine-infused blood to just give up. We throw some ice on it after a hard practice, drink some chocolate milk, and pray for taper to come soon.
There is also the fact that swimmers are in the water for hours on end. We train ridiculous amounts of yards to drop only a couple of hundredths off of our best time. Most teams have their swimmers in the water doing doubles for most of the season. There is also the time spent in the weight room. If you think eating a lot of food is simple, let me tell you, it is sometimes too hard to properly condition my hair much less to eat a microwave meal.
So if you think you can handle early mornings, high pressure, dry skin, a ridiculous appetite, and going through the stress of making yourself a Pillsbury dough boy while putting on a tech suit, you should definitely try out swimming! You will be in the best shape of your life and make some of your closest friends by going through painful lactate sets together. Hop on over to your local YMCA and sign up for lap swimming now.
