Yesterday afternoon I headed straight to the pool from work to get in a good solid swim workout, since the weather outside was a bit nasty. It wasn't a crazy workout by any means, since I'm still not in that great of swimming shape. I did 4,500 yards [roughly 2.5 miles] in an hour and 20 minutes or so, and dropped the interval on one of my sets by 5 seconds. It was a pretty good workout, and it gave my legs a chance to rest up in preparation for next week's trip to Colorado!
When I hopped in the pool though, there was this young asian kid [12-13 maybe?] swimming in the next lane, with who I could only assume was his dad crouching down at the end of the lane on the pool deck with a stopwatch in hand. I couldn't really understand what the dad was screaming half the time because it was either very broken english or another language all together....that and pools tend to echo a lot.
Now, to this kids credit, he was swimming his ass off. He was just doing 50 yard sprints of breaststroke over and over again, but each time he came to the wall completely out of breath, his dad would berate and scream at him for something. His dad eventually threw a kick board at this kids head as he came into the wall and told him to start kicking instead, but if he ever slows down he'd be in trouble [at least that's what I think he was saying.] By this time I'm about half way through my set of 10 100's on 1:20, so I'm getting a little winded, but I'm still moving relatively quick, and I was barely moving faster than this kid, and he was just kicking. Now, I'm out of shape, and he appeared to be very in shape, but still, he was moving.
He kicked his heart out for maybe the next 5-10 minutes straight [which is a long time to be kicking that hard] and eventually his dad got really fed up, and barked something along the lines of 'Are you slowing down?!' and the kid had to sadly reply 'Yea' as he was in a lot of anguish. The dad then threw a water bottle at him and told him to get out, they were done for the day. Yea.
Now, anyone who knew me while I was swimming in college knows that I am all for maximum effort and hard work. If you want results, you gotta train hard. But there comes a point where you can just take it too far. I do believe this dad was well beyond that point. No one should ever be forced to do or compete in something if it's no longer fun. Yea, practice can suck sometimes, but you want to be there for the betterment of your individual or team progress. I can tell you with certainty that this kid was not having fun being barked at with kick boards and water bottles being thrown at him. It's probably quite a shame too, because this kid was fast, and with the right coaching he'd probably do pretty well for himself, but if his dad has any part of his swimming future I'd be surprised to see him swim past high school.
After almost 17 years of swimming, including 4 in the NCAA ranks, I can say with the utmost confidence that I loved the sport just as much at the end as I did back when I was barely more than a toddler. I believe there's something to be said about that. All too often you hear of kids just getting burned out and quitting because they lost their love for something that was once so much fun. It's sad.
Yesterday evening my friend shared this video, and all I could think about was how opposite this was to what I witnessed in the pool earlier in the afternoon.
This is fun, this is what swimming should be. Ryan Lochte just got bumped up a few notches in my book, although I don't think he'll ever top Jason Lezak. <--- [DO NOT click that link if you don't want your heart rate to rise or your palms to get sweaty.]
1 comment:
Maybe one day you'll see that asian kid in the olympics! Hah...
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