from an anon:
hi so I’m 14 and I know I’m not the best swimmer or anything I do sprints, like 50s, 100s, 200s, and people always think bad of me, like the distance swimmers, because they think I take it for granted and that I think I’m better than them, but I don’t and I hate it when people always bag on sprint swimmers, because we work hard too. Just because we don’t swim 12 miles at practice doesn’t mean we aren’t working our assess off trying to drop not even a tenth of a second, and all these blogs, not saying specifically you, but a lot of swimmer blogs I follow always say how annoying sprint swimmers are, and it really hurts me, because we work hard too, and just because we don’t do the same things as the distance swimmers doesn’t mean we’re not “real swimmers” or anything. I still swim 12 months of the year, 7 days a week, double practices every weekend. Okay that was long and sorry that was just kind of a rant but I had to say it. Ugh okay
I know exactly how you feel. Being a sprinter myself, I’ve had my share of people telling me that my events are “easy” and that I “don’t really have to work that hard,” but it’s not true at all. If anything, the sprint events are the hardest because they require absolute perfection. If you screw up, even once, even on a single stroke, that could be a tenth of a second right there. Alternatively, if you screw up on a stroke in say a 500, nobody would know because the time wouldn’t show it as conspicuously. So sure, distancers can train the day away and that’s how they’d get fast. But sprinters train too. They may not equal the amount of yardage put in by the distancers, but the effort put into it is the same. The only difference is in the actual race, when distancers have a hefty five minutes plus to get the job done, while sprinters find themselves at the end of their races after only a mere twenty odd seconds.
I guess I got into a little rant there too hahaha. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but that entitlement doesn’t quite include the right for one swimmer to tell another swimmer that what they do doesn’t make them a real swimmer.
Anonymous
