A lot of musings unrelated to Ralph Lauren's Olympic design, which uh, needs to be discussed.
At any given time, it's likely I'm doing some kind of obsessing. Rarely in ways that lean towards any sort of compulsion, not even in an exaggerated, casual "gosh I'm so OCD" sort of way; instead, I obsess in phases. Since I was little my Dad made fun of my "one-track mind," sometimes just calling me "one track" when I took something, talked it breathlessly to death, and ran with it, to who knows where. Later he would just imitate the sound of a train going by (naturally, with incredible accuracy) when I started up again. Last summer in particular can be largely divided neatly into these little spurts of intense one-tracked-ness, ie, There is nothing but the Sabres, There is nothing but Bonnaroo, There is nothing but Harry Potter.
Oh hey Beijing. You're up next. I've always lurrved the Olympics, and while the right pixie-like America's sweetheart figure skater has been known to steal my heart on several occasions, and I watch speed skating with the same sense of excitement and anxiety I reserve for like, drug trafficking-themed movies, and what the FUCK is with that ski jumping madness? the summer Olympics are my business. It's that-time-of-every-four-years again when the world acknowledges swimming as a sport, and actually gets sort of into it (or at least led into Phelps' logic-defying dominance on a wave of VISA endorsements and dark shadowed chiseled ab shots.) I've been randomly having little bursts of excitement for 8-8-08! over the past few weeks, but I watched the opening ceremonies tonight with a mix of yessss here we go again and oh...right...the Olympics are long, and sometimes like...this. China pulled out the fucking stops and manipulated lights and hugeass LED screens and thousands of people in ways I'm not going to try to comprehend. The parade of nations prompted the same response in me that me Whit & Theresa had watching the ESPYs, sort of emotional and dammit I love sports/ Amuricuh/ The World in this case. But also, the whoops this is getting redundant response, and the realization that very few swimmers were going to be able to walk by when the US finally paraded out because it's too close to most of their events and taper doesn't mess.
And then I wandered downstairs and found myself doing what I do. I don't remember how it started but soon enough I'd steeped myself in hours worth of catching up on every swimming-related NY Times article and blurb. At one point I stumbled upon the ginormous red tape tangled mess of the Jessica Hardy doping scandal (the scandal isn't so much the test results, but apparently impossible to manipulate regulations which are keeping the right people from going in her place.) It led me to Tara Kirk's (said "right person" whose already broken heart is sort of being scooted off to the side by the bureaucratic toe of USA swimming) blog, and whoops, I'm a goner. I'd known little about her before seeing her on What Not To Wear a couple weeks ago and sort of fell in love with her but mostly with the idea of having a swimmer on the show-- an hour devoted on how to dress man-shoulders, woop woop! She had a huge smile and did everything with a visible sort of glowy excitement about what she deeply hoped, and had worked and worked for, would be her future.
One of Rick's routines near meet-time at STAR was to say there was only two times crying was acceptable in swimming. When you're third at trials (no Olympics) and 4th at the Olympics (no medal.) Tara was third. I don't know her at all, she's not even one of the ones that I know someone who knows her, but by some fate of google I found myself reading her words at it was startling, how easy I slipped into them. I've always felt a certain sense of something that isn't exactly discomfort, but more like a distance of my own creation from myself and the swimming world, whether it be in my own conference or just that, the world. As much as I've committed myself to the sport, to my team, and to crazily loving it the most when its beating me up & making me ache for hours, for thousands of yards on end, I've committed myself to never being just a swimmer. In quick retrospect I learned I knew very little about what I wanted out of a college, but I knew I didn't want to room with a swimmer, wanted friends, an identity, outside of the swim team, outside of athletics, just like I'd always had. In one of several of Coach's teary farewell speeches, he told us how the sport had defined him, and how he hoped it'd define us. I took a fierce quiet comfort in how I've consciously worked for the opposite. So it's because of this that at times I feel like I'm this spy in this little subculture that's very much mine, but in a very different way. But Tara Kirk's hurt, the scale of which I will certainly never, ever reach, was my hurt, the exact same way I feel when this sport has crushed me to my core, beyond any hope of rationality or comfort, at least for a moment I can't help but have. She used language that stung, strung together her ache in careful images when words would fail most, certainly those in similar situations who rely on the sports cliches Erica and I have taken to tallying at the athletic dept banquet.
I read this all after throwing myself into pre-Olympics media coverage and discovering once again how sort of strange and cool it is that we're all in the same boat. It's training for SUNYACs and its training for the Olympics, the two couldn't be more different in the way of scale and uh, speed, but we're all operating on a kind of framework that's essential, constant, for anyone who's crazy enough to love this enough, to work for it. We get up way too early, we push ourselves til it kills, we don't know why we do it sometimes, but only know that we couldn't not. When articles focus on Bob Bowman's training strategies, I'm reminded of what awaits me in the fall, as Scott's already hinted that he's got plenty of Bowman's workouts up his sleeve. Walking in circles around the Beijing "Bird's Nest" wouldn't be ok for us the day before champs either. My insides lurched as a I read about races to come, because pre-meet anxiety is universal, and not actually being the one swimming does not a calm swimmer make.
I guess my feelings about swimming have just needed some working out as of late (and lj gets to come along for the ride I guess?, and if be some wild chance you're actually still reading this you deserve a cookie or a box of wine or something, I'll get on that.) In a long, perfect talk I had with Rick last week, I told him I feel like I'm in the best place I can be with swimming, mentally. We have a brand new coach whose tough and driven and best of all, distance-focused. Leadership has been semi-confusingly placed into separate hands. I'm excited, and I'm stepping back and letting it happen. It's my senior year, "it is what it is." I dragged my feet to the pool after almost going several different times after I got home, and like always, I wondered what the hell had taken me so long. I belonged there in the water like I always have, no matter what shape I'm in. And it isn't enough to swim alone, spoiled, in the peace that is the gorgeous pool I grew up training in, I need to be shoved into to our little outdated one being yelled at, cheered for, aching, music blaring, girls shouting encouragement, complaining, pushing pushing to be the first in the lane, euphoric, when its over, with exhaustion. It's not the only place I'm meant to be, and it gets the shaft here, in my Buffalo-self and what I choose to messily empty out of my brain-place actually-here. But it's where I need to be, for the same reasons they all do. And when I suddenly become an unabashedly inattentive waitress tomorrow night in favor of directing all attention to the flat screen TVs that surround the bar, hands wringing with excitement, that's why. I stayed up into the wee smalls in 2002, not breathing as Sarah Hughes won the gold, but these are my people, this, for a part of myself that will always be there, is what I do.
Oh hey Beijing. You're up next. I've always lurrved the Olympics, and while the right pixie-like America's sweetheart figure skater has been known to steal my heart on several occasions, and I watch speed skating with the same sense of excitement and anxiety I reserve for like, drug trafficking-themed movies, and what the FUCK is with that ski jumping madness? the summer Olympics are my business. It's that-time-of-every-four-years again when the world acknowledges swimming as a sport, and actually gets sort of into it (or at least led into Phelps' logic-defying dominance on a wave of VISA endorsements and dark shadowed chiseled ab shots.) I've been randomly having little bursts of excitement for 8-8-08! over the past few weeks, but I watched the opening ceremonies tonight with a mix of yessss here we go again and oh...right...the Olympics are long, and sometimes like...this. China pulled out the fucking stops and manipulated lights and hugeass LED screens and thousands of people in ways I'm not going to try to comprehend. The parade of nations prompted the same response in me that me Whit & Theresa had watching the ESPYs, sort of emotional and dammit I love sports/ Amuricuh/ The World in this case. But also, the whoops this is getting redundant response, and the realization that very few swimmers were going to be able to walk by when the US finally paraded out because it's too close to most of their events and taper doesn't mess.
And then I wandered downstairs and found myself doing what I do. I don't remember how it started but soon enough I'd steeped myself in hours worth of catching up on every swimming-related NY Times article and blurb. At one point I stumbled upon the ginormous red tape tangled mess of the Jessica Hardy doping scandal (the scandal isn't so much the test results, but apparently impossible to manipulate regulations which are keeping the right people from going in her place.) It led me to Tara Kirk's (said "right person" whose already broken heart is sort of being scooted off to the side by the bureaucratic toe of USA swimming) blog, and whoops, I'm a goner. I'd known little about her before seeing her on What Not To Wear a couple weeks ago and sort of fell in love with her but mostly with the idea of having a swimmer on the show-- an hour devoted on how to dress man-shoulders, woop woop! She had a huge smile and did everything with a visible sort of glowy excitement about what she deeply hoped, and had worked and worked for, would be her future.
One of Rick's routines near meet-time at STAR was to say there was only two times crying was acceptable in swimming. When you're third at trials (no Olympics) and 4th at the Olympics (no medal.) Tara was third. I don't know her at all, she's not even one of the ones that I know someone who knows her, but by some fate of google I found myself reading her words at it was startling, how easy I slipped into them. I've always felt a certain sense of something that isn't exactly discomfort, but more like a distance of my own creation from myself and the swimming world, whether it be in my own conference or just that, the world. As much as I've committed myself to the sport, to my team, and to crazily loving it the most when its beating me up & making me ache for hours, for thousands of yards on end, I've committed myself to never being just a swimmer. In quick retrospect I learned I knew very little about what I wanted out of a college, but I knew I didn't want to room with a swimmer, wanted friends, an identity, outside of the swim team, outside of athletics, just like I'd always had. In one of several of Coach's teary farewell speeches, he told us how the sport had defined him, and how he hoped it'd define us. I took a fierce quiet comfort in how I've consciously worked for the opposite. So it's because of this that at times I feel like I'm this spy in this little subculture that's very much mine, but in a very different way. But Tara Kirk's hurt, the scale of which I will certainly never, ever reach, was my hurt, the exact same way I feel when this sport has crushed me to my core, beyond any hope of rationality or comfort, at least for a moment I can't help but have. She used language that stung, strung together her ache in careful images when words would fail most, certainly those in similar situations who rely on the sports cliches Erica and I have taken to tallying at the athletic dept banquet.
I read this all after throwing myself into pre-Olympics media coverage and discovering once again how sort of strange and cool it is that we're all in the same boat. It's training for SUNYACs and its training for the Olympics, the two couldn't be more different in the way of scale and uh, speed, but we're all operating on a kind of framework that's essential, constant, for anyone who's crazy enough to love this enough, to work for it. We get up way too early, we push ourselves til it kills, we don't know why we do it sometimes, but only know that we couldn't not. When articles focus on Bob Bowman's training strategies, I'm reminded of what awaits me in the fall, as Scott's already hinted that he's got plenty of Bowman's workouts up his sleeve. Walking in circles around the Beijing "Bird's Nest" wouldn't be ok for us the day before champs either. My insides lurched as a I read about races to come, because pre-meet anxiety is universal, and not actually being the one swimming does not a calm swimmer make.
I guess my feelings about swimming have just needed some working out as of late (and lj gets to come along for the ride I guess?, and if be some wild chance you're actually still reading this you deserve a cookie or a box of wine or something, I'll get on that.) In a long, perfect talk I had with Rick last week, I told him I feel like I'm in the best place I can be with swimming, mentally. We have a brand new coach whose tough and driven and best of all, distance-focused. Leadership has been semi-confusingly placed into separate hands. I'm excited, and I'm stepping back and letting it happen. It's my senior year, "it is what it is." I dragged my feet to the pool after almost going several different times after I got home, and like always, I wondered what the hell had taken me so long. I belonged there in the water like I always have, no matter what shape I'm in. And it isn't enough to swim alone, spoiled, in the peace that is the gorgeous pool I grew up training in, I need to be shoved into to our little outdated one being yelled at, cheered for, aching, music blaring, girls shouting encouragement, complaining, pushing pushing to be the first in the lane, euphoric, when its over, with exhaustion. It's not the only place I'm meant to be, and it gets the shaft here, in my Buffalo-self and what I choose to messily empty out of my brain-place actually-here. But it's where I need to be, for the same reasons they all do. And when I suddenly become an unabashedly inattentive waitress tomorrow night in favor of directing all attention to the flat screen TVs that surround the bar, hands wringing with excitement, that's why. I stayed up into the wee smalls in 2002, not breathing as Sarah Hughes won the gold, but these are my people, this, for a part of myself that will always be there, is what I do.