Swimming Through Adversity: Quick Life Lessons to Take Away from Swimming

Photo Courtesy: Johannes Jansson

By Jacob Riley, Swimming World College Intern.

You swim two or more hours a day to get better at the sport you love. You do this for nobody but yourself. Swimmers work hard; this is a fact nobody can dispute. That’s why swimmers are very employable after their aquatic careers are over. Swimming teaches young men and women all across the country lessons they can take away for their future careers and lives.

The most important lesson that swimming teaches us is how to work hard. Swimmers have to work hard in the water to be the best they can. This comes from our competitive spirit, and general desire to be the very best version of ourselves that we can be.

We want to look up at that scoreboard and know that we had nothing else to give. This is one of the crucial elements to swimming that is learned very early in the process. The best swimmers work the hardest. This translates well for real life success. The swimmer always wants to be the hardest working person in the room, and this bodes well for future careers and life in general.

Swimmers also know how to brush off a bad swim. Well, most of us do anyways. This is a really important life lesson for us to learn early. Not everything is going to go our way all the time. I had to learn this especially early as a 50 swimmer. Life is a game of inches- sometimes it goes our way, sometimes it doesn’t. It is important for us to learn how to shake off the times where it doesn’t go our way.

One of the most important lessons we learn from our sport is how to swim through adversity. Nobody’s rise to greatness is an easy one. We all have had something we had to push through, even when we didn’t want to keep going. This is an important lesson to learn for our future. Life is difficult sometimes, and the best way to succeed is to push through and do it. When life gives you oranges instead of lemons, orange juice is just as good of a drink as lemonade.

Swimming prepares us for the real world because it teaches us life lessons very early. It is important to understand that this sport prepares us for most everything the real world can throw at us, and that is an important thing to take away from swimming

All commentaries are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Swimming World Magazine nor its staff.

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