I’m a high school junior on my school team and I’m absolutely terrible at swimming. I was on a preteam for 1-2 years as a kid but then stopped all sports for a while until 8th grade, when I joined a club practice team and then the competitive club team along with varsity freshman year. I had to stop around February 2020 when the pandemic hit and was only able to get back after virtually no exercise for a year this spring for a shortened swim season. Now everything is “normal” again and I’m still somehow on the school team and hopefully can start the club team again soon.
Naturally, being a new swimmer, my times were never great. My 50 free was about 38, 100 free 1:24, 100 breast & fly 1:40, 100 back 1:50. However, with all that time off, I’ve gotten so much worse while everyone else has been steadily improving. Now my 50 free is in the 40s (~41) and 100 free is in the 1:30s (~1:33). I’d developed a mild eating disorder during the pandemic and lost a lot of weight and muscle, though not unhealthily thin. During last season in the spring, I was going on about 1000 calories a day (this was just after I decided I needed to recover) and was not doing great at all. I’m doing better and going on 1500-1850 calories a day now.
I keep comparing myself to others, now pretty much the worst on the team. I have a friend who just joined varsity in 9th grade with me who had no swimming experience at all and I keep comparing myself to her. In ninth grade, my 50 free was faster than hers by over 5 seconds but now she’s faster than me. My breaststroke is my only decent stroke and there’s always 1 exhibition lane for the event, but I’m never put in it and I know I can go faster than some of those in it. I’m always only in freestyle and now it’s my worst stroke, relatively speaking by far so it’s just even more embarrassing for me to look even worse than I already am.
I keep getting upset with myself and wanting to give up. My club is currently closed due to some damage from Hurricane Ida but I’m reconsidering if I even want to do it. It was bad enough having 12 year olds faster than me in freshman year, but it’s just too much to have that as an almost 17 year old.
I feel like I don’t know how to push myself, both mentally and physically. I always want to preserve my energy during sets since I’m scared of running out of energy and crashing. I find that I have the same mindset during 100 frees ( I somehow do breaststroke and backstroke all out fine) and don’t know how to get over it. What’s a good way to know how to balance this? How much should I give in to sets? My practices are about 1h 15 min for reference. And is there any advice to get past this mental barrier for both races but also just the overall situation?
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