Top 10 Reasons Why Swimming is the Hardest Sport of All
Swimming is usually the most-watched sport during the Summer Olympics. While swimmers understand the rigorous demands of the sport, others who simply “splash around” or tune in to watch every four years, are unaware of the difficulty the athletes go through on a day-to-day basis. Montana Lloyd, a swimmer and student journalist at UNR, discusses why and how swimming is the most difficult sport there is.
#1. Water-resistance & Temperature
Swimming is one of the few sports performed in water. Besides being performed in water and not on land, water is almost 800 times as dense as air. There is much more resistance, which prevents being able to move through it quickly. This also makes swimming hard because there is no solid surface that we can apply force to, like the ground if you are running or moving on land. Swimmers have to rely solely on balance and technique to move through the water.
How fast a swimmer moves also depends on the water temperature, so if the pool feels like an ice cube, good luck trying to move fast. If the pool feels like a hot tub, it’s very hard to swim when your body feels like you’re on fire. The ideal temperature of a pool should be between 77 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above or below that is the difference between life or death.
#2. Year-round Training
Unlike most sports who get an offseason, in swimming, there really is no such thing. Swimming is an all-year-long ordeal. The only break swimmers tend to get is a nice and long two-week break after the end of the championship season. After that break, it’s right back to soul-crushing workouts. Taking a two-week break is equivalent to being out of the water for around two months, so coming back to swimming after taking time off is brutal, hence why “taking a break” is very uncommon in swimming.
#3. Tedious and Tormenting Technicalities
Every stroke in a race matters. Swimmers have to constantly run through drills during practice to perfect the different parts of each stroke. You can only rely on strength and endurance for so long, and when that falls apart, a swimmer’s technique comes in to save the day! Not to be dramatic, but it takes years of practice to build a solid technique. Coordinating your body also comes with technique. Every part of your body is moving at the same time, so learning how to coordinate your arms and legs and body movements is not so easy-peasy, making swimming a lot more challenging than just kicking and moving your arms in the water.
#4. To Breathe or Not to Breathe…
That most certainly is the question. Unless you are swimming on your back, a swimmer’s face is in the water more than half the time. Swimmers breathe 30–40 times per minute less than cyclists or runners. That’s a lot. Imagine breathing a lot less than most sports can and then accidentally choking on water… not a fun time.
#5. Horizontal Positioning
Except for bob-sledding and cross-country skiing biathlon, where the athletes are stationary, swimming is the only sport where you spend all your time horizontally. Now before you jump to conclusions, sleeping horizontally and swimming horizontally are two completely different elements.
For starters, when you’re swimming, you have no ability to see your arms or hands. Water already makes things difficult but because you are in the water, you have no way to tell what you’re doing when you do it. Your heart rate also drops by an average of 20 beats per minute because of the long exposure of lying flat.
Blood in your brain drains, making swimmers feel dizzy constantly during a hard workout or just after swimming back and forth for hours on end.
#6. No Social Life Whatsoever
“I can’t, I have practice” is the most common line you will hear from just about any swimmer. Forget staying up late on a Friday night with your friends, unless you want to suffer the entirety of Saturday morning practice. Once at a high level of competitive swimming, missing practice for anything is just not a thing. Swimmers make the ultimate sacrifice to be the very best they can be and go to practice every day, even if that’s the absolute last thing you’d want to do, and even if taking a nap mid-afternoon sounds way more appealing than having your second practice of the day.
#7. You’re Tired and Sore Constantly
“All I do is sleep sleep sleep no matter what” should be the line of Dj Khaled’s famous “All I Do Is Win” song. No amount of sleep can prepare you for the day’s next events. Balancing school and practices and weight sessions (sometimes three workouts in a day on top of going to school) can make you feel straight up on the verge of dying. Swimming after having a weights session the day before is like swimming with five-pound weights on each ankle. Getting up at five am every single morning to jump into a cold pool an hour later definitely is the icing on the cake.
#8. Dropping time (or not) …
Dropping time is every swimmer’s dream when they step up on the blocks before a race. Unfortunately, once you get past your teen years, dropping those five seconds every time you race an event is long gone. It can literally take months, sometimes even years to shave off a tenth of a second in your best event, which can be extremely demotivating. All that time and effort, and don’t forget, added pressure, to drop a tenth of a second may seem like too much work but swimmers live for those tenths.
#9. You’re Always Hungry (and I mean, ALWAYS)
Depending on the intensity of the workout(s) each day, Olympic-level swimmers can burn 3,000–10,000 calories per day. Swimmers can expend about 5,000 calories in a four-hour workout during really tough training and have energy expenditures that are 1.5–3 times higher than the average active individual. Because you burn so many calories, your body needs that fuel to recover. You could have meals as big as a Thanksgiving dinner made for a family of five and it still wouldn’t be enough, leaving you feeling hungry just twenty minutes later. While having an extremely fast metabolism has its perks, never feeling satisfied is actually the worst feeling ever.
#10. Dry skin & crunchy hair is just not the move
You can always identify a swimmer with their wet hair and exerted faces, still flushed from that morning’s workout. What you don’t see underneath are the flaky, burning skin and dry, crunchy hair. The pool chemicals, specifically bromine and chlorine, react with the oils to protect your hair leaving your cuticle exposed, and over time result in crunchy and cracked hair. The same effect happens with your skin, the chlorine stripping your skin of the protective layer of sebum, creating that burning, dry feeling. Although this isn’t seen as “hard,” it is actually very challenging keeping up with having healthy hair and skin when it gets ripped apart every day, sometimes more than once a day. Being a cross between looking like a scarecrow with crunchy hair and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer aren’t exactly the most appealing features to have.
