I was talking with a couple of people yesterday, and we were speculating that we as "normal" people really don't have any concept about how fast these Olympic swimmers really are. We came up with the idea if they put a regular person in one of the lanes to swim against the competitors it would really drive home just how spectacular these athletes are. We laughed about how we would still be on the first lap when the others were done and had left the pool!!
True, that. The closest comparison I can come up with was when I went swimming with my sis. I was about 17, she was 14 and was very close to swimming for the City of Birmingham team, with possible Olympic qualification being mentioned (that all ended when, after passing trial 1, she allowed our cousin to embarrass her into not attending trial 2...only for that cousin to then say that, had it been her, nothing would have stopped her from doing it. More than a touch of the old green-eyed monster).
We didn't specifically call it a race because we both knew what the outcome would be, but we jumped into the pool and did a few lengths (our town, at that time, boasted an Olympic-sized swimming pool; it's since been closed due to lack of funds before being remodelled into two smaller pools and re-opened to the public).
My sis ended up doing 200m and was out of the pool having a breather by the time I'd completed just over 100m. Ten minutes later, she challenged me to a 50m race...me on the surface and her underwater. I didn't think there was any way she could do 50m entirely underwater, but there was and she only bloody won!
On the flip of that she couldn't run to save her life, while at 15-16 I was zipping around doing the 400 in a shade over 46 secs, though my best event was the 800. One lad who tried taking me on at that ended up finishing second anyway and throwing up in the grass. I got "Look what you've made him do!", to which I replied "I didn't make him do anything. He did it to himself."
It's similar with the cycling, though. I once had the chance to have a few laps around an indoor track and was pretty pleased with my average speed of around 47 kph. Then you see the Olympic bods' averages in the 60s and 70s and...yeah, 47 looks pretty sick, so even the slowest riders have always been safe from the likes of me.
It really does deepen your respect for all of them, not only in terms of what they can do, but how hard they have to train and the dedication they must show just to get to that level, let alone stay there.
