He realised he was good at it, and started dropping out of the other sports to focus on the pool. Swimming was merely a survival skill to be learnt before he started enjoying it way too much and it got winninger too. His childhood growing up in Ahmedabad teemed with sports – tennis, golf, rink skating, a spot of football. But it’s what I’ve always been best at and we’ll find out when we get to World Championships and Asian Games which one I’m better at now. “Also, you swim for 15 minutes or 16 minutes and you find out you don’t have a Personal Best, so it sucks in that sense. It’s such a difficult and long event that if I swim it 5 or 6 times in a season I’m probably not gonna have as many great and amazing 1500s as I will 400s or 800s.

I’m trying to think of the right words – it’s not high maintenance, but it’s just harder to get right. “I lean towards 1500, it’s what I’ve been the best at. The teenaged sensation considers 1500m his pet event as much as the 800m, despite its rigours and limited returns.

I’m never gonna complain about PB, if I get gold and national record and PB it’s very crazy of me not to be happy with that,” he says. Frankly, I could’ve been much slower and still called it a good race. I don’t see any point in beating myself up for not being faster. “Under those conditions, it is as about as much I can realistically expect. So, he was pretty happy once he found out. It was a personal best (PB) for him by two-lengths. The 800 came on the back of new meet records in 400m (3:52.55) and 1500m (15:29.76), where he went past Kushagra Rawat’s 15:38.13. And then just be a little stronger and faster to be quicker than that,” he says. “Replicating that race in a world-class facility, indoors and everything, swimming against people that are faster might just push me that extra 1 or 2 per cent and I’ll be able to get under 8. But the race Nehra executed at Hyderabad over the 800 to clock 8:01.81 was near perfect, even if the conditions were difficult – outdoor pool, warm humid climate and sunny.

The 19-year-old from Ahmedabad is the latest sensation over the freestyle distance events – 800m and 1500m – where India boasts a good crop of swimmers, all pushing each other to better timings. But ideally, I get it at the world’s and build upon that heading into Asian Games.” “If I don’t get it there, I’m fairly confident I should have it by Asian Games. “Hopefully, at the World Championships,” he says of achieving it at the Japanese port city of Fukuoka. On a record-breaking spree at the Nationals at Hyderabad this last fortnight, Aryan Nehra hopes to be the first Indian to dip under-8 minutes over 800 metres. Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element.

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