Swimming requires hours and hours of gruesome training, like many other sports, but you may not see any improvement for months. If your early mornings and multiple practices in one day actually pay off, you get excited over a half-second drop in one race.
Practices are a mental and physical battle urging yourself and your body to keep going. You can't talk to your teammates because when you're at the wall, you're catching your breath to get ready for the next round.
As soon as practice starts, the countdown to when it's over begins. If you have something to think about or a good song stuck in your head, you'll be okay. If not, the practice will seem like an eternity.
However, that one practice when you feel like you're flying makes up for the ten bad practices before that. When you're leading the lane and the people next to you can't keep up- there's no better feeling. A good practice is what keeps you going. When you have a bad practice, you look forward to the next one in hopes of making it even better. Somehow swimmers are capable of pushing past the knotted shoulders, sore hamstrings, and overall aching body pain to keep going.
Somehow just having your teammates near you is good enough for swimmers. Everyone working towards a common goal makes it easier to move when you may not be able to breathe. Even though many may think that swimming is an individual sport, it is largely a team sport. When you swim and compete with your teammates cheering you on, it makes an unbelievable difference. To swim for someone makes it that much easier to go through each practice or race because you're performing for someone else.
We train and train so that when we touch the wall, we look up to see a personal best. At that moment, we don't think about what we've done to get there. We think about what we can do to get even better.
To sound cliché, a team is the best thing to be a part of. Not only do you make friends who understand you on a deeper level, but you find a new family away from home.
No comments:
Post a Comment