Shouts From the Stands: Why Swimming Never Leaves You

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Brooke Watson is a former SEC finalist and four-time member of the SEC Academic Honor Roll at the University of Tennessee. Since completing her swimming eligibility in 2013, Watson has moved to work in the land of swimming: Sydney, Australia. Even so far away from her Tennessee roots, one thing that will never leave her, though, is swimming.

Read Brooke’s personal blog, which is NOT all about swimming, at brooklyneverywhere.tumblr.com!

It won’t be an ugly breakup, when you leave swimming. It will be emotional, certainly – any relationship that long, with that many highs and lows, is going to leave an impact. After all, you’ve given your entire self to the sport, devoting your REM cycles and Christmas breaks without a second thought. But it’s given you so much as well – confidence, family, and a ridiculous metabolism, to start. There may be things you would have done differently, but you wouldn’t call them regrets. Swimming has shaped the very core of you, and you remember the battles more vividly and fondly than the rewards. It’s just that this, like so many good relationships, has run its course.

Even if you’re one of the lucky few whose last race involves a podium and a personal best, the end will still feel abrupt and unceremonious. This makes it easier, somehow. It’s time. You may, godspeed, continue to train seriously after your college career ends, but it’s more likely that you’ll skip your final warm down and swear off chlorine for an indefinite period of time. If you listen, you can hear your war-weathered skin and shoulders lift up prayers of relief and thanksgiving.

Friday nights now will be spent munching popcorn in the dark and waiting for a show to start, and it won’t feel anything like chomping Powerbars in fluorescent natatoriums, anxiously anticipating the 400 IM. Your hair will dry completely for the first time in years, and you’ll optimistically and mistakenly muse that you may never have to see the business side of 5 AM again. Your interest will be piqued again during championship season, and you’ll cheer your team on through your computer, but you won’t obsessively research dual meet results throughout the season and investigate which teams tapered in December.

But at some point, the water will call to you. The time lapsed since your last race will have sepia-tone all your memories, and the groans you used to talk about crowded warmup lanes and permanent goggle rings will become fond and knowing grins. It might be a few weeks before you miss it, or it might be years, but one day you’ll hear about the lanky brace-faced kid who took down your last club team record, and you’ll be surprised to find yourself asking what her splits were. You’ll get competitive when four college swimmers roll into Dunkin’ Donuts and order enough food to feed a small village, and you’ll start telling anyone who will listen about how you used to regularly put down a dozen in a single sitting after a tough workout. You’ll pass a pool on your way to work, and it will be decided before you even form the conscious thought – you think you’d quite like to go for a swim.

It’ll be weird to wear a one-piece again, and you won’t ease back into it. You’ll feel clumsy and awkward as you realize that your lats haven’t done anything in the past nine months, and you can’t remember the last time you supported anything heavier than groceries. Awkwardly pawing your way through a single lap of butterfly will make you want to clutch some young whippersnapper by the shoulders and tell them to appreciate what they have. You’ll try to race the person next to you, and you’ll almost be able to audibly hear the disconnect between the directions of your brain and the movement of your limbs. It doesn’t matter if you’re twenty-two and meant to be in the height of your prime – after nine months out of the water you’ll feel simultaneously like a busted-up 80-year-old veteran and like a toddler walking for the first time.

But if you keep moving, things will come back, bit by bit. Your brain will turn off in that old familiar way, the way you sometimes have to turn your computer off to make it work again. You’ll forget about counting yards or laps or any number above than the three strokes you take between breaths. You’ll do some underwaters, maybe, and get cocky when you make it the entire 25 meters.  You’ll stay an hour longer than you intended, until the sun’s gone down and your fingertips are blue and wrinkled.

You’ll play, the way you used to at the beginning.

Because you may stray for a while, but swimming will always be there. Regardless of whether you ever compete again, you’ll still have heavily sheathed brain pathways associated to the movement of your body through the water. It’s more than a sport. It always has been. It’s making the fastest interval group for the first time, and taking D-lane Christmas cards with the mall Santa. It’s eating pasta off of paper plates on the night before state champs, as the taper coursing through your toes makes you laugh a little too loud in the hotel lobby. It’s belting along to Journey on the way home from Saturday night finals, with 18 of your identically parka’d best friends crammed into a 15 passenger van. In those times, swimming was your whole world. But even though it’s not anymore, even when you leave that world, swimming never leaves you.