Swimming. It’s a sport people only care about during the Olympics, and completely ignore at all other times. Athletes work nonstop, all year, often multiple times a day, yet have to defend the legitimacy of their sport and the intensity of their workouts. So, for those many non-swimmers out there, what does it mean to be a swimmer?
Photo Courtesy of Skyler Kane
The Chlorine Perfume:
I’m sure you’ve heard about swimmers always smelling like chlorine. That’s not an exaggeration. When you’re in the pool that often, the chlorine just seeps into your skin (and a lot of your clothes, too) and it’s impossible to get out. It doesn’t matter how often you shower, you’ll be sitting in that 12:40 p.m. class of yours and suddenly catch a whiff of your own chlorine perfume. Even grosser, it’ll come out in full force when you sweat.
Common Misconceptions:
Yes! We sweat! I know you don’t feel it in the water because it washes right off of you, but I promise your body becomes all kinds of dehydrated while swimming. We do need to drink water. No, we do not drink the pool water. We know way too much about what is in that water to drink it (on purpose, but you will swallow more than your share of mouthfuls on accident). Besides, the chemicals in the water actually dehydrate you more, so drinking it wouldn’t do us any good.
Rising Early. Like Way Too Early. And Way Too Often:
5:30 a.m. alarms are no joke. They’re a reality. A four-times-a-week reality. Two of those mornings you’re dragging your butt to the weight room and the other two it’s for an extra hour and a half in the pool. Then you have to go about your day knowing you have another practice in eight hours.
Let’s Talk About Those Practices:
I once was walking to class after morning practice, discussing our workout with a fellow swimmer, when a non-swimmer friend asked me why we didn’t just work out after school. I had to turn to her and say, “We do. For over two hours.” Two and a half hours to be precise, at least at Hamline University. We start with a warm up that’s typically at least a thousand yards before we jump into our sets. Practices can vary depending on specialty. For example, sprinters and distance swimmers’ yardage may be very different by the end of practice, and doing anything butterfly is an intense workout in and of itself. Each day we all swim several miles, anywhere from five to eight thousand yards, before we cool down and make our way to food.
Our Second Sport Is Eating:
This is no joke. According to several sources, including this Fox News article and a Business Insider article reporting on a Mayo Clinic study, swimming is one of the highest calorie-burning activities. This makes for a great workout, and an even greater appetite. For swimmers, going up for seconds after practice isn’t just an option, it’s an expectation.
We’re All Mad Here:
At least, we seem to be a little crazier of a bunch. Every sport seems to have its personality (with exceptions, of course) and swimming seems to collect oddballs, outcasts, and the ones who might just be a little off. That is to say, we tend to be a bit louder, a bit more eccentric. Not unsociable, but not often the most well-known. There is something to be said about how we tend to group together and keep to our people, but when you spend four hours a day together, it’s easy to get attached.
The Meets:
I’ve learned recently that there are many people with zero idea of how swim meets work. I’ll save you the long winded, detailed explanation and just keep to the basics. First off, once we get into the thick of season, we have one pretty much every week. There are two types of meets we can go to: duals (which can be tri’s, but often not more) or invitationals. At duals, we go up against one other team (or two others in a tri). The meet is pretty short, usually a couple hours, and long events like the mile are typically neglected. In invites, there could be anywhere upwards of five teams, some not even in our conference, and often any event goes. These meets can take all day, or even multiple days, which helps us prepare for the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) meet.
The Two True Loves of Every Swimmer – Taper and Tech Suits:
Taper. It’s the light at the end of a very long, dark and exhausting tunnel. Taper comes at the end of the season, when you’ve put in all the muscle destroying effort you can during the season, and it’s time to let your body recover. In the week or so before your final meet, your practices get progressively a little easier, progressively a little shorter. You never want to stop swimming, but the focus now might be technique rather than building muscle. Along with taper, there’s one other key to a phenomenal final meet: tech suits. Those are the fancy suits you see Olympians wear, the ones that go down to your knees. These suits go by other names, too, such as fast skin. Emphasis on skin. These suits are super light and thin, and made of a special material to help you slide right through the water. They are a monster to get on, though. Typically, if you’re in the market for a good tech suit, if it doesn’t take you twenty minutes to put on, it’s too big. A lot of times, a swimmer with a good tech suit will have a team of fellow swimmers helping her get her body into the tiny, fragile material. Any rip or tear causes utter heartbreak. High end tech suits can cost 400 dollars or more, but you can also find some decent, older models for around 100 dollars.
MIACs:
For Hamline Swim and Dive, our season officially starts come October and it ends at the MIAC conference meet mid-February. It’s a brutally long season. To make MIACs, you have to make at least one conference qualifying time, and while not every swimmer makes it, many do. Once you’ve made one, you can swim up to three individual events and two relays. For three days, we’re at the pool for 12 hours. The beginning of the day is prelims, where everyone who made MIACs swims, and then the top 16 in each event swim the same event again later that day during finals to actually earn points for their team. There’s an awkward gap between prelims and finals that typically finds swimmers outstretched in the stands relaxing, killing time and possibly even napping. It’s an exhausting three days, but usually it’s worth it.
TL;DR:
Swimming kind of sucks. It takes up all of your time and saps all of your energy and in the end, no one but your teammates, close friends or immediate family care. When you ask us, we’ll say we hate it, but we keep doing it because we don’t know why, or because we suck at land sports or because I guess we’re hoping we’ll drown. But the truth is, we wouldn’t keep swimming if we didn’t love it.
Thumbnail: Hamline Swim Team by the pool. Photographer: Cindy Ulsrud.