Monday, February 22, 2010

At Pool's Edge

While I was staring at the pool this morning before my swim class started, I was admiring the simplicity of this hole in the ground. It is a rectangle with varying depths of four to fourteen feet. It isn’t big by any means. It isn’t Olympic-sized. It isn’t ten lanes wide. It isn’t many things, but what it is, is enough to build a season on.

Sixty swimmers dove into this pool in September and they’ve been diving in every day since. This is where they put in the hours. Their sweat washed off by a wave. Their puke sucked down by the gutter. All of them accomplished swims in this hole in the ground that they never thought were possible. That becomes routine after a while. Doing The Impossible, a new class, meets Monday thru Saturday at the pool for two hours. The prerequisites are too long to list. When you complete a season, you will know you have them.

We have many swimmers that have those prerequisites and tomorrow we are taking the best of them to Chicago for the Horizon League Swimming and Diving Championships. For six months we presented them with the impossible in order for them to believe anything is possible this week.

Swimmers, take your mark.

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