This is going to be an attempt to explain why I do what I do. It may seem simple, but I think if you ask any athlete why they compete you would find that athletes have a hard time finding something simple way to answer. The easy answer is because they love it, but that it oversimplified, because no one can love it every day.
In fact a lot of athletes hate it from time to time. Training your body to be a world-class athlete means enduring pain, for months on end.
The best athletes push themselves in ways other people wouldn’t believe or understand. In pain and stress athletes find strength and that is what athletes crave.
All athletes want to be stronger and faster, but few are willing to push out of their comfort zone to find new levels of strength and speed.
I once wrote “True strength is the ability to weather a storm.” I wrote that after my father passed away and my entire life felt like a storm. Pain came from every aspect of my life, but through that pain I found the strength to stand on my own two feet again.
It is similar to the athletes daily lifestyle: get up early, inflict pain on body, inflict stress on mind, believe that you do it better than any one else, go to bed and repeat. It’s simple really.
But why do I do it? Because of the way it makes my heart race, because of the nervousness that vanishes in an instant the moment the race starts, because of the absolute agony my body goes through in a race, because of that sweet release I feel when I hit the wall, because I love competing against the best in the world, because I take pride in the traditions of USA Swimming, because I have wanted it my entire life, because I need to, because I have to and if I wasn’t doing this I wouldn’t be happy.
I do it to prove that I can.
No comments:
Post a Comment