people talk about the brotherhood and sisterhood
they get in their volleyball, basketball and soccer teams,
when they practice 3-4 times a week and sometimes
have seasons that run for a few months. In swimming,
you train at least nine times a week, excluding
the hours of dryland, stretching and track.
Season starts in the first week of September,
and if you're lucky, and crazy enough to call
yourself lucky, it ends in the last weeks of July.
so you take a month off, give your chlorine-soaked skin
a respite and start next year's season a month later
complaining to all your friends that you are "fat" and out of shape.
oh, and in swimming, you've got such blue blood that you
make fun of public swimmers, and have a hidden contempt
for any other type of athlete who only trains 3x a week.
you're in the water for 2-3 hours at a time, sometimes doing that
twice a day, and sometimes waking up at 4:30 in the morning so you can
be at the pool 15 minutes early for your 5:30 practice to get some
stretching in. You do kick sets until your calf either cramps or your legs
are numb, and then you do pull sets until you can hardly prevent yourself
from doing dolphin kicks to move forward the extra 2 cm over 100m. And
then you get a 50m warmdown just in time for a main set. You swim
6-8km a workout, and when your school friends ask if you get "bored"
swimming all those laps "back and forth," you wonder how to explain the
difficulty in being bored when you alternate between exchanging gossip at
the walls with extreme pain in all your physical extremities.
swimming is not for the body-conscious. After a couple hours, your
training suit has ceased to be revealing, even when you rip out the lining
and practically eliminate the need for a suit in the first place. After
your first meet, you've seen 3/4 of your team naked, and 3/4 of them
have seen you naked, either from low-riding speedos, girls that spill all
when they pullup their suit straps, or deck changing. And it's not even
a big deal. Time magazine may say that swimmers are the most
sexually active athletes, but you'll never find a group of boys anywhere
else than on pool deck that can still obsess over "adding .8 in my 100
free" when surrounded by 200 girls walking around in their size -8
aquablades with their straps down.
you'll live for the 3 hour bus rides to towns with a population that
doubles when your team arrives, sleeping in the aisles or on eachother.
You'll cry when you add less time than it takes to blink to your best time,
and you'll be surrounded by a group of people hugging you and reassuring
you because they all know how much of a failure +0.5s feels like. Shaving
off 0.08 is a miracle. Speaking of shaving, the girls give shaving tips to the
guys, or even shave with them. Legs. Arms. Nether regions? All for the
sake of that 0.0000001s you'll take off, and the "smooth" feeling
you get, that no non-swimmer will respect you for.
and then there's the drama. Every swimmer, and just as often boys
and girls, have inner drama queens. Who knew that who you sit with on
the hour long bus ride to training camp could be so political? And every
swimmer has fallen for another swimmer. You can tell by the way they
stand at the blocks and cheer for their every race, give them shoulder
massages, splash eachother in the warmdown pool, sit next to eachother
in the hot tubs and on the Greyhounds.. and by the way they live halfway
across the country from eachother, hanging out at the meets that happen
every 3 months.
and there's love. Lots of love. Love for your sport and your race. Love for
your team, in the cheer-offs and deafening screaming during finals. And
love for eachother, the people you laugh and cry with, who give you their
extra green apple Powerades and whose team shirt you're probably
wearing. They'll zip you up, badmouth your coach who said nasty things
about your 100 free, gossip with and about you, and scream your name
with frantic arm gestures for a 2 minute race even though you are in
the water with a cap on and cannot possibly hear them.
They'll know once you hit the touchpads if you were off your best time,
stretch your arms behind your back, and wish you good luck and
mean it even if they're squaring off next to you in lane 3 for the final.
that's swimming. And if you have it and you can do it, no matter how
hard it gets or how elusive that time standard is, be "in it" as much as
you can. Even if it doesn't work out and you have to quit due to the
insanity of 9x/week practices or devastating shoulder injuries,
you'll be a swimmer your whole life, and you'll never fully drain the blue
blood that makes you laugh when you join your school soccer team.
Its not all true, I'm not a winter swimmer, still most of it is..
patrick//mouat//16//french immersion
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377,800 suck on that[/i][/u][/size]
OMFG...LMAO
yes it should be true....
GO LIONS