Some people find calm in coffee shops or forests. I find it in cold tiles, the smell of chlorine, and that soft echo right before I dive in.
If you look at my week from outside, it’s just training sessions, work, buses, university and messages. From inside, it feels more like a conversation between my body and the water.
I started swimming 17 years ago because my mom wanted me to try something new. I had no idea back then how much that simple decision would shape my life.
At first, everything felt routine: practices, cold tiles, the smell of chlorine. But slowly, the water became the place where I felt most like myself.
Swimming turned into discipline before I even understood what discipline meant. It gave me a structure that stayed with me through school, decisions, and every moment I felt lost.
The pool also became my comfort zone — the one place where stress, noise, and expectations dissolve the moment I dive in.
Training at 7 AM is still part of my daily rhythm. It makes me genuinely happy to know I can show up with energy and push through high-intensity sessions that challenge me every single time.
Swimming didn’t just shape my lifestyle — it shaped my mindset. It taught me resilience, patience, and the joy of improving quietly, day after day.
There are thoughts that never make it into conversations. They dissolve somewhere between the flags and the wall. Here are a few I managed to catch and write down afterwards.
On days when my brain won’t shut up, I choose hard aerobic sets: 10 × 200, tight intervals, almost no rest. It sounds like punishment, but it’s not. It’s like borrowing discipline from the lane when I can’t find it anywhere else.
Those seconds stretch forever. I’m scared and excited in the same breath. My legs shake, my hands are cold, but somewhere under the noise there’s a quiet voice that says: you’ve done this a thousand times.
There’s a special kind of tired that only appears after a good session. Wet hair, marks from goggles, shaky legs… and somehow I feel lighter than when I left the house. It’s like the water took a part of the day’s weight and kept it.
It’s not just the big competitions or PBs. It’s also the playlist on the way to practice, the lucky cap, and the way the first sip of water tastes after a long main set.
These routines are tiny, but together they turn training from “something I have to do” into a place I’m actually missing when I skip.
