Many rowers find themselves balancing life as a sportsperson alongside their studies. This is inevitably challenging, no matter the stage of academia you find yourself in. With competing demands on time, attainment and energy, student athletes can quickly find themselves burnt out.
There’s often a constant expectation to ‘succeed’. When much of your training day-to-day revolves around the pursuit of both short- and long-term goals, it becomes easy to feel that, as soon as you prioritise either your sport or your studies, you are underperforming. And as training gets busier, cutting away at time spent in the library, or missing classes to travel to a race, many struggle with the sense that they’re falling behind.
Balancing these two identities is difficult – but what can we learn from embracing both? This article offers some top tips to help manage the two side-by-side.
Tip 1: Bringing performance to academia
Whilst easy to say, and hard to put into practice, success as a student-athlete might not be about having more time, but facilitating better time.
This is by no means a call to maximise productivity or curate a highly efficient lifestyle, but rather there may be small but significant ways that you can draw upon a well-developed performance mindset to make the most of the times when you are focusing on your studies.
In rowing, you’re often following a pre-determined training plan, categorised into weeks of varying intensity. Commonly, the academic calendar follows much the same pattern, so why not plan for your studies in the same way?
In acknowledging where workload will increase, ease or become the main focus of your day, it is much easier to apply your sport-learned skills like discipline and focus. Knowing and mapping the road ahead, just as you are used to doing with sport, makes managing periods where academic workload may need to take precedence less troublesome.
Framing your need to study and achieve desired work-related aspirations, just as you do your ambitions in rowing, gives the demands that academic work puts on your time the recognition they deserve.
Tip 2: Prioritising helpful habits
Balancing the time commitment of rowing and academic studies is made substantially easier when you organise your life to make the moments between the two activities straightforward.
In my experience, this has involved consistent meal preparation. This means you have nutritious, recovery-aiding food as and when you need it.
It also involves prioritising sleep.
In establishing and communicating boundaries with yourself and your friends or flatmates regarding the necessity of sleep for maintaining your student-athlete lifestyle, you can avoid potential issues of cumulative fatigue that arise when we forget, in the chaos of a busy schedule, that stopping and resting may be the most productive thing you can do.
This is by no means advice or guidance on how to live your life in the long term, but whilst your goals lie in attaining high academic performance and success in rowing simultaneously, prioritising these sorts of habits can be a means to stop the moments in-between training or studying getting in the way of achieving your goals.
Notedly, these habits do not have to be maintained obsessively – this is by no means an advertisement to efficiency-load your life – but integrating routines and boundaries may be a helpful step on the way to propelling both your sporting and academic activities.
Tip 3: Maintaining constructive communication
On a practical level, the student-athlete duality can be made more emotionally and mentally manageable through consistent and honest communication with your coaches and teachers/supervisors.
Rather than waiting for overwhelm or periods where you are pressured into committing more heavily to one side of your student-athlete identity, speaking to relevant coaches or professors can help build an environment that feels adaptable, flexible and importantly, manageable.
Of course, both sides will uphold demands on your time, but setting up communication early on what this means allows both sides, as well as yourself, to align expectations.
One conversation may not solve your competing schedule, reduced engagement with training, or need for extensions on an assessment. However, building a support-focused narrative over time with those involved with your training and studies will avoid moments where both sides feel in conflict with one another.
Tip 4: Remembering your ‘why‘
This article does not intend to find catch-all solutions to the challenges of managing your status as both a student and an athlete. This balance will look different for each individual, and assuredly, it will take time to figure out. There is, however, a unifying component to every student-athlete’s decision, and that is the persistence of a ‘why’.
Even if diverse in their explanation, a drive to be both underpins a student-athlete’s mindset.
Some may have a concise answer to what this is; others maybe less so. But spending some time figuring out your why, and persevering because of it, should validate your endeavours to tow both lines. All this to say, your ‘why’, or ‘what am I trying to achieve?’ should remain forefront in your mind as you navigate the ongoing challenges of being a student-athlete.
BUCS Images credit: Drew Smith at Drew Smith Photography
