"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 7 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 August. So you take a week off, give your chlorine-soaked skin a respite and start next year's season a week 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 1.5-2.5 hours at a time, sometimes doing that twice a day, and sometimes waking up at 5:00 in the morning so you can be at the pool 15 minutes early for your 5:45 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 warm-down just in time for a BA main set. You swim 6-7km a day, 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 pull up 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 each other. 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 0.0000000000001s 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 each other in the warm-down pool, sit next to each other in the hot tubs and on the Grayhounds.. and by the way they live halfway across the country from each other, hanging out in 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 each other, 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 200bk, gossip with and about you, and scream your name with frantic arm gestures for a 4.5 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."
