By Alan Karickhoff, Swimming World College Intern
“Practice makes permanent” – Coach
Two-hundred and thirty hours in the pool. Fifty-seven hours in the weight room. Three-thousand eight-hundred and sixty four hours in my head– the hours that make up one official season for a Division III swimmer. They are the hours between the first official practice and the last official race. This doesn’t include the time put in during the spring, the summer, or the first three and a half weeks after stepping back on campus, but they make up the time where my focus and dedication is at its maximum.
On September 23, the first day of my last competitive swim season, more thoughts swam through my mind about eating habits, sleeping habits, and drinking habits. It’s not just the hours in the pool and the weight room that make up a season, it’s also the hours spent preparing for practice. The constant soreness in my arms and legs keeps swimming at the front of my mind for those 3,864 hours.
Those thousands of hours lead up to 10 races, averaging a total of 10 minutes of swimming, at the end of February in the Centennial Conference Championship meet.
In two ways I could compare a swim practice with Coach to a western typology of a meditation session with a Tibetan monk. First, both require intense internal focus helped by repeating a mantra over and over within the mind. In the pool, there’s one mantra that rambles through my head – pull, catch, kick, flip, breath, 25, pull, catch, kick, flip, breath, 50, pull, catch, kick, flip, breath, 75, pull, catch, kick, flip, breath, 100, two more.
Second, they both wash anxiety about an upcoming exam from my mind. There are two hours where my mind is focused on pull after pull, kick after kick, with nothing to take my attention away. I follow the black line along the bottom of the pool that guides my practice lap after lap. Although, a thought about dinner, or a thought about my next test slips into mind, it is quickly drowned out by the waves crashing over my head and my mantra resurfacing as I continue counting the laps.
One difference between meditation and practice is that after a practice I feel as though I walked away from a car accident, while I imagine walking from a meditation session would leave me feeling cleansed and relaxed. Another difference is that I breathe out through my nose and in through my mouth.
“What you do in practice, you’ll do in a meet.” – Coach