A way of living

It’s 6:55 a.m. on a Tuesday. Across campus, athletes have rolled out of bed, half-awake, and are heading to their second home, Dodge Fitness Center. Perhaps the night before, they were up until 3 a.m. studying for a midterm or writing a paper, but the thought of skipping practice never seriously crossed their minds. They have an obligation—they have, in the words of this year’s varsity motto, been committed.

When my friends complain about their 9 a.m. classes, I try not to let my competitive nature show in the battle of who has it worst (a battle I prefer not to win, even if it is still a victory). By the time they get to class at 9:10, they have been awake for 30 minutes to an hour (ten minutes if they are talented). When many of my fellow athletes and I go to our 9 a.m. classes, we have already been awake for two and a half hours.

Now it’s Friday night, and you—like all of our friends—are going out to what is supposed to be the best party of the year. But while we would love to go out and dance and drink and have fun like the rest of the student body, the thought of running hills the next morning at 9 a.m. won’t quite let us forget how much worse those hills will feel hungover and tired (something many athletes know from experience).

It is now Sunday night, and the first Contemporary Civilization paper of the year is due tomorrow. You pull an all-nighter with the knowledge that after class you can take a two-hour nap. While you are thinking of your nap, the athlete one room over, writing the same paper, is thinking about the two-hour practice running stairs that they will be doing the next day on no sleep.

It’s Wednesday now. You are tired from three days of classes, and you need a big meal at John Jay with a cheeseburger and French fries, topped off with about five of those chewy (when you’re lucky) brownies with ice cream and whipped cream to get you through the day. The athlete next to you has a salad, a portion of the most decent meat they could find, and a bowl of fruit. They look at your meal and would love nothing more than to have one bite of a brownie, but, while the results aren’t always readily obvious, they know that their meal will help them be a better athlete.

Now it’s the start of the semester, and you look at your schedule and smile because you arranged all of your classes to be in the morning or only in the evening or so you do not have classes on Mondays and Wednesdays. Many athletes look at their schedules and attempt not to frown. We start class at 9:10 so we can get a few classes in before practice, but our schedules are not full, so we fill in some more classes after our afternoon practice. Soon we realize we start our day at 9:10 a.m. and finish at 8:00 p.m., with small breaks throughout in which we try to fit in a meal or an hour of work.

Don’t misunderstand these accounts. Athletes do not always have early practice before their 9 a.m. classes. On Friday nights, we sometimes get out and have fun, even with practice the next morning. We nap whenever we can, sometimes if only during our five-minute break in the middle of CC. We let loose and eat crappy food and five desserts, if only once every week or two. We have the first pick of classes, and sometimes this makes it possible to have decent schedules.

The purpose of this article isn’t for you to look at that athlete sitting next to you in class, wearing sweats because they have just come from practice or are going to practice, and take pity on them. Nor is this an attempt to break the jock stereotype. This article was written with the purpose of helping you understand the student athlete population and give you insight into the lives of committed athletes who consider their athletics in all facets of their lives. “I came here for the academics,” I have been told, as if I did not. Athletics isn’t a way to get out of homework or a reason to slack off or a reason to miss class. Athletics is an enrichment of free time. It is a commitment to something more than just being at Columbia—it is being a part of Columbia.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.