I started swimming competitively when I was eight years old and loved every aspect of the sport, from the heavy smell of chlorine that hung in the air to the adrenaline that pumped through my veins as I took my first dive into the chilly waters of the pool that I practiced at.
It was exhilarating for me and was more fun for me than any sport I had tried before. I had taken a few swimming lessons when I was younger and had enjoyed the time I spent with the instructors who taught me how to take my first strokes in the water.
While I swam throughout elementary and middle school, it wasn’t until high school that I truly found my passion for the sport. It became the center of my life, the glue that held my entire high school experience together.
It was the focal point of my social life as I forged bonds with people who enjoyed the thrill of swimming as much as I did. When most people look at a swim meet, they just see the chaos of splashing water, flailing arms and coaches yelling at the top of their lungs.
To me it’s a sight that I’ve become so familiar with that it feels like a second home.
There’s no feeling like diving into the waiting water below, hearing the rush of water run over my ears and feeling the rush of the race as I kick my legs and my arms pull the water with all the strength I can muster. Swimming was my life for the four short years I remained in high school and in those years, it taught me so much about myself and the waiting world.
Swimming helped me learn to put value in the things I do. The practices gave me something to look forward to every day. It taught me the meaning of hard work and what it means to be good at something you truly enjoy and love.
I’ll never forget the very first medal I won while swimming as it helped me prove to myself that I could achieve any goal no matter how difficult. But the most important thing swimming taught me is self-motivation.
For the most part, swimming is a sport that revolves around the individual and not so much the team as a whole. It’s not the same as with most other sports such as football or soccer where there are individual entities of the team all working together in order to score the most points and win the game. While winning meets and gaining points is important, swimming is mostly an individual sport.
Swimming is about setting records for yourself and beating them, and nothing feels better than getting out of the pool knowing you were able to break your own personal record, even if it’s only by a few milliseconds.
That sense of satisfaction pushes you to try even harder next time and to want to continue shaving off time as you improve yourself to get as close as you can to perfection.
While I don’t swim competitively anymore, it will always be a part of who I am and the time I spent doing it will always be ingrained in my memory. To me swimming was never just a sport or a race, it was a lifestyle.
Grant Pawlak can be reached at grant.pawlak@spartans.ut.edu.