I feel like I am currently in a war between two sports: swimming and cross country. Swimming is my main sport, and I train for around two and a half hours almost every day. Cross country is about another hour of running. Doing either one by itself is actually not that terrible. Running a few miles can even feel pretty chill sometimes, and swimming is something I have been doing for a long time. The real problem is doing both on the same day.
When I combine them, I get extremely tired. There was one day when I basically crashed. I felt so exhausted that I honestly thought I was going to die. Obviously, I was not actually dying, but that was how my body felt at that moment. It made me start wondering whether I can really keep doing both sports for a long time.
My mom thinks I probably need to choose. Swimming is my main sport, so from her point of view, it does not make much sense to destroy myself doing cross country and then have nothing left for swimming. I understand what she means, but I do not really want to choose. Part of me wants to prove that I can do both. If someone tells me that something is too difficult or almost impossible, my first reaction is usually that I want to try anyway.
The problem is that three hours of sports in one day is a lot. One hour of running plus more than two hours of swimming takes up a huge amount of time and energy. I know it is not going to be easy. Sometimes I am not even completely sure I can do it. I keep telling myself that I can, but there is also another part of my brain saying, “Are you sure about that?”
Still, I really hate quitting. I have always felt like I am not the kind of person who gives up easily. Even if something looks almost impossible, I want to try before deciding that I cannot do it. Maybe I will fail. Maybe eventually I will realize that doing both is too much. But I do not want to quit one of them just because it is difficult.
I have started thinking about how I could make it work. For cross country, maybe I do not need to race every practice like it is the Olympics. I can slow down sometimes and stop trying to prove something every single run. Swimming is still my main sport, so I need to save enough energy for it. If I want to keep both sports, I probably cannot go one hundred percent in both of them every single day.
Swimming itself is also complicated for me right now. I know this is probably a weird thing for a swimmer to say, but sometimes I really do not want to swim. There are days when I get into the pool and feel like some random kid drowning in the ocean. I am tired, I do not want to be there, and it feels like my body is asking me why I am doing this again. But at the same time, swimming is still my sport. I have spent too much time on it to just throw it away.
I think part of the reason this feels so difficult is that I always feel like I have something to prove. I want to prove that I can handle both sports. I want to prove that being tired does not automatically mean I have to quit. But maybe I also need to learn that being tough does not mean destroying myself every day.
So right now, I still want to continue both. I do not know if this plan will actually work. Maybe I will have to change it later. Maybe I will need to run easier, swim differently, or eventually choose one. But for now, I want to try. Swimming is still my main sport, cross country is something I also want to keep doing, and I want to see whether I can find a way to make both fit into my life without completely crashing.
Leave a comment