What the Pool Taught Me About the Podium

I have been swimming for eleven years. I have been studying law for two. When I stood up as Speaker 1 for my university at the National Moot Court Competition at United University, Prayagraj, in March this year, I assumed the second number would matter more. It turned out to be the first.

Nobody tells you how lonely a moot court podium is. Your teammates are behind you and your memorial is in front of you, but once the bench starts asking questions, you are on your own. It felt familiar. A swimmer on the blocks is in the same position. Months of training come down to a few minutes, and nobody can swim them for you.

Preparation is most of the race

Most of swimming happens away from competitions. It is early mornings, the same drills repeated until they stop feeling like drills, and sets you never think about again. Races are short. The work behind them is long.

Mooting is the same. Our problem raised a constitutional law question inside a family law dispute, and most of my preparation was quiet, repetitive reading: judgments, then the same judgments again, then the arguments rewritten until each one could stand on its own. By the time the oral rounds came, the arguments I made were the ones I had already rehearsed many times. The few minutes at the podium were the visible part of weeks of work.

You cannot control the water, only your stroke

In a pool you swim the conditions you get. The lane, the swimmers next to you, the temperature of the water. Worrying about any of it costs time you do not have.

A bench is the same. Judges interrupt. They ask the question you hoped they would skip, or one you never thought of. During rebuttals and bench queries I found that the only useful thing to do was what a swimmer does after a bad turn: let it go and get back into rhythm. A calm, short answer followed by a return to the argument works better than a long defensive one.

Breathing is a skill

Beginners hold their breath under water and then panic. Learning to breathe on a pattern is one of the first real skills in swimming, and one of the most underrated.

Speaking before judges asks for the same thing. When I am nervous I speed up, so I started treating pauses the way I treat breathing in a race, as part of the stroke instead of a break in it. A pause before answering a difficult question gives the bench time to settle and gives me time to think.

Where I go from here

I am moving my training to the Talkatora Stadium pool in New Delhi, and I have three more years of law school ahead. I don’t expect either of them to get easier, but I am less surprised now by how much they have in common. Both reward people who turn up when it is boring, stay calm when it isn’t, and keep going.