STUDENT - ATHLETE

It’s 4:30am and your alarm wakes you up. You crawl out of bed to prepare for training. You arrive in the pool, start stretching and you see your teammates who still has sleep written on their faces. The coach tells you to go down the pool and you mentally prepare yourself for the cold water to engulf you. You’re given a workout so challenging that even listening to it is alreadymaking your stomach churn. You practically kill yourself for 3 hours in training just to remove milliseconds from your PBs. And when training ends, your day has just begun. Others are just waking up to start their day while you’ve already swam 6-7km. Going through the day, you’re given the same school workload as everybody else but somehow, more is expected from you. If you slack off, you’re not the one who’ll be blamed. You have to make sure you work just as hard in or out of the pool or else your sport or your team will be dragged too. And at the end of the day, we go to bed knowing we have to do it all over again tomorrow.

It’s incredibly hard being a student-athlete and people ask me why we still do it, why we strive so hard. It’s not just because of the scholarship or the glory it brings. Its because we can’t live without it. It’s part of us. Though we might not always like it, we will always love it. We live for the adrenaline when we win. We live for moments that knock us to our knees. We live for bus rides and team pictures. We live for the friends that become family. We live for the memories and the pain. We live for our sport.