Okay, so I’m starting to write this about 2 months into the swim team season and I realized something pretty quick— all of swim is hard. They don’t go easy on you, regardless of if it’s the first day, if you’re a freshman like I am, or if you a load of AP Chemistry homework that you’d rather be doing. Every second of practice keeps me on my toes. The discipline involved in this commitment is pretty hard, but I’m getting through it and improving.
The warm ups aren’t so bad. The exercises are fairly casual and you can even afford to talk to your friends during that time. Some of the people on the team even sit down and play Brawl Stars or whatever while we stretch. I spend a lot of my time talking about classes and academic stuff with friends- JW is already doing AP Chem, and that’s what I plan on taking soon (Come check out Course Review in a year) so I spend a lot of time grilling him for information. Oh, yeah, DK has also done AP Chem as a freshman. Did I mention that HL has done it too?
Yeah… a lot of people in the swim team are good not just at swim, but at academics. You’ll never find a kid who’s taking less than 3 APs in their sophomore year— my school was already very competitive and was filled with smart people who totally ran the show. Swim team takes that to another level. I plan on making almost all of my classes AP classes (which are college level in high school) in 10th and 11th grade (although I’m not taking APs yet and everyone else is) and even with that I still look stupid next to the rest of them.
I should also mention that everyone is put into their Group B or Group A based on their skill: It depends on how quick they are, although it doesn’t necessarily determine Varsity or Junior Varsity, as it mixes around a lot. Group A is usually the quicker group, and Group B is the slower group, though they shouldn’t be underestimated as there are a lot of really fast kids in Group B.
Once we finish warming up, we typically prepare to get in the water. Often times we’ll do these things called “dryland exercises”, and they’re probably the most painful workouts I’ve ever done in my life. Often times, Groups A and B will rotate through Dryland and swim exercises, though occasionally we do both of them together. They start off by making you jog all the way from the pool deck to the other side of school. This is just a warm up so it isn’t the end of the world for me, but I can understand why someone would get tired doing it. Our campus is HUGE. It might be bigger than Casey’s animal attributes.
And then, the worst part… the actual exercises. There’s a million of them which I couldn’t name to save my life, but one of the most notable ones are pushups. We’re only required to do ten of them per set, but they love to prolong the pushups and make each one take fifteen seconds. It burns us out fast. And if they see ONE kid messing around, they reset the count for everyone. People even do betting over how many extra push ups we’ll have to do; it’s that normal. Oh, did I say one kid messing around? That might be AK I was talking about. He’s quite an animal. He’s one of the few people who dares to talk wild in front of the coaches, and he does it to people a lot too. 95% of the time the coaches yell at someone, it’s probably to him for doing something wrong with pushups. He’s gotten the most threats to be sent out of practice so far for sure. His conversations with the coaches are pretty comedic, however, such as this one:
Coach: I met your mom last week.
AK: LAST NIGHT?!!!
Literally everyone else on the scene: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Even the other coaches were laughing… we had to do extra pushups which half ruined it.
Now for the actual swim… there’s a load to talk about, and I’m not going to spend three weeks writing about every single workout that we did in the whole team. They usually start with a quick 200 warm up and then move on to some really difficult sets. There’s all sorts of things we do, from half a kilometer of butterfly straight to dozens of short sprints. Practice usually lasts for a couple hours so we get a lot of things done in that time, but at the expense of pretty much all our energy for the day.
You’d better believe some kids mess up when they push us this hard. And what do the coaches like to do when we mess up? These hellish exercises called “Meat Grinders” which nobody wants to do but everyone makes us do it. The first time I had to do meat grinders was at the end of our first practice. The coach had called all of us to tread water at the edge of the deep end of the pool so he could talk to us. The wall wasn’t large enough for everyone to cling on, so roughly half the team (which is a huge group of kids) treaded water nearby. Not everyone liked treading water, so some kids started to cling onto the lane lines instead, putting immense pressure on it and then… bam. The line lane broke down, and the coaches were pretty upset about that.
“You will pay for that mistake,” He declared, “With five meat grinders next practice!”
Everyone groaned and some protested when they heard that. I didn’t know what that was yet, so I immediately assumed it would be hell. I asked my friends what “Meat grinders” were, and they just replied with “Hell, but it’s only five so we might be fine.”
The coaches explained the next practice that a meat grinder started with a dive off the block, then a freaking twenty five Fly Sprint to the other side. Once we reached the other side, we climbed out of the pool and did five burpees. While we did the burpees, the coaches would monitor the other side to make sure we were doing them right. If someone didn’t…. Well, they risked adding another meat grinder to the count. And we’re still not done. Right after finishing your burpees, you’re already tired and probably want a break, but you still have to dive in and sprint another 25 free before climbing out again and doing another five pushups, then lining up at the block to prepare for your next one. That’s one meat grinder. You’re going to inevitably burn yourself out through those, so we often fight over whose turn it is to go first on the meat grinders.
Five meat grinders might sound like hell to you, but it’s nothing compared to the number we did later on. One day, our old friend AK was late to getting in the pool. Oh no! The coaches told us we’d have to do 5 meat grinders after we finished warming up. Then, it turned out that this other guy, EW, was also late and the coaches added an additional few meat grinders, making the total 8 meat grinders. After we finished warming up, we started the meat grinders.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
“AK, IF YOU DO NOT STOP MESSING AROUND, YOU WILL GO HOME!”
Six. Seven.
We were getting close to the end of the meat grinders, but we were tired. We couldn’t see that the end was almost in sight and some of us let go of our form, messing up the burpees and slowing things down. As a result, they added another four meat grinders to the count, and we kept going. Me , DS, and TB kept fighting for second place in the line as we did them.
The form was still bad, and by the time we had finished our twelfth meat grinder, the coaches got tired and basically said, “Just do three decent ones and you can be on your way.” We finished those and ended with a total of fifteen meat grinders. If fifteen doesn’t sound like a large number to you, try doing a 50 free and fly sprint with burpees 15 times while being yelled at to do better form. It compounds into your death pretty quickly.
And the last thing to explain are the swim meets. Swim meets usually occur on Fridays at my school, except for this one time where one meet took place at an aquatic center an hour away. Meets typically begin with me having to dip out of my last class (Read 9th Grade Tri 3 5th Period Course Review “High School Honors English 2” to see more when that comes out) and walk to the pool deck about 40 minutes before the end of school. I set my stuff down before talking to my friends and changing. After changing comes to process of warming up which takes around thirty minutes to do. After this we sit down and watch the dive team do their thing for a while- this is often the time to eat snacks if we’re hungry and some people linger on in the pool to get a little more practice.
After this, we get our events which will usually come in the format of a list of events and participants in each event. We also get cards which are basically one time use passes for each event we’re put into. I’ve lost track off the full list some events include(not exhaustive) medley relay, 50, 100, 200, 500 freestyles, 100 breast, fly, and back, Individual 200 medley, 200 and 400 freestyle relays… did I miss anything? Probably did, there’s a trillion events to keep track of but these are the ones I could immediately remember. Each event type gets four separate events, one for boys and girls on JV and Varsity. (I’m boys JV) So far, there are still several of these which I haven’t done, but to my knowledge here’s all of them in a nutshell.
Medley relay – the one that starts out every meet (I’ve done this one a few times, I swam breast since its the least energy consuming)
50 free- the one that everyone does when they want to swim the least (I’ve done this one a few times, I can do 2 lengths of the pool in about 30 seconds)
100 free- the one that everyone is judged off of (my time is 1:10)
500 free- If they make you do this, you’re screwed and panic. If they don’t, you use the 500 times to get rest because it usually takes 30 minutes to get through all of them. Luckily I haven’t done this yet, but I’ve heard horror stories…
200 free- kind of like the 500 freestyle but a little more bearable. Haven’t done this either, thank god…
100 breast – I’ve done this once I’m kinda mid at it but it’s not tiring so whatever
100 fly – Haven’t done this yet, but it’s butterfly so it’s comparable to 500 free, honestly.
100 back – up until recently I never really did backstroke until one day they forced me into it. More on that story later.
200 medley – haven’t done this yet but it sounds scary
200 free relay – a race to see 4 people.
400 free relay – basically the 100 free with the same hype, only four people do it instead of one.
With all these crazy events there also comes quite a few interesting stories. There are too many of these to list out in detail, but I’ll go over the most entertaining ones.
First up…
During the first meet, DS was sent to do the 500 free- the suicide event. The 500 is 20 lengths of the pool and half a kilometer, so it’s a lot of swimming but another challenge can often be keeping track of how many laps you still need to do. Most of the time, a person will stand on the edge of a pool with a sign of numbers to indicate how many laps are left for whoever is doing the 500, in this case. TB was in charge of counting for DS, and DS went through the 500 like normal. He went at a reasonable speed for a 500, and although he wasn’t first, he did better than what I could do. He was almost there… one more stroke… he was done.
Wait, what?! Why did he flip turn? He was already done! What was he doing? He was doing extra! He continued to go, and everyone who was watching noticed he was doing more. He had done an extra 50… and then he flip turned again. TB frantically tried to signal to him with the signs that he was already done, but DS wasn’t taking a hint. Finally, he stopped. He had done an extra 100 he didn’t have to do- everyone noticed. He hadn’t been that slow, but now he was going to get last for it. As soon as he climbed out of the pool, everyone was there to talk to him.
“Dude, why’d you do an extra 100?”
“You know that you were done?”
DS defended himself. “I didn’t do anything wrong, bruh,”
“Well did you not see me counting?” TB challenged him.
“Yeah, but I didn’t do that cause you’re wrong,”
“It’s not about how many he needs to do,” TB told us. “It’s about how many he can do.” We all laughed.
Second story… also a 500. I think the 500s are where all the 500s happen. I didn’t see them start at first- usually the 500s were an opportunity for me to eat food or talk to friends, but instead I had to prepare for a 100 back which I never signed up for. Backstroke is probably my worst stroke, and I wasn’t expecting a time better than 1:50. To try and keep myself from getting too embarrassed, I went into the pool to practice a bit extra.
Then, I stopped to check the status of the others who were doing 500s. Wait… I noticed one of them was out of place. The one who was doing that was a boy named Chase. That wasn’t a 500 Freestyle. They were doing butterfly! I jumped out and watched with my friends as he spent seven entire minutes doing his butterfly without the slightest wavering in his form. He finished in last, but on a quicker time than I ever could have done even in my best state. The wildest thing is that no one was even mad, and when Chase went to the coaches to ask their thoughts on what he did, all they responded with was a few ways that he could improve his technique.
And that basically takes up to the end of the story. Overall, swim team is not the kind of thing you sign up for if you aren’t ready for rigorous activities. Also, if you do decide to join, and they tell you to do ten pushups… be prepared for twenty. More swim team articles soon…?