Swimming is a life skill. Literally, it can save your life if you happen to fall in to the liquid that covers most of the world and grateful backyards right now. Just being able to keep your head about the surface, and draw oxygen in your lungs is absolutely an essential skill.
Swimming saved my life, even though I’ve never found myself literally drowning. When I was five years old, my mom tried to coax me into swim lessons. That was the same year my older brother had learned to swim. But I refused- I was scared, I said.
Still, I wanted to come to the pool every day. My mother wanted to swim a mile each day over the summer, and I wanted to be with her. I stayed in the shallow end as she checked on me every lap. She swam breaststroke mainly, as many people of that generation influenced by British learn-to-swim philosophy did.
So the first stroke I learned was breaststroke- before taking a lesson. I learned it from my mom.
At age six, I dutifully learned to swim but thought little of it but a little more independence at the pool over the summer. In the next year, I met my friend of thirty years when we were paired up as new students at 1st grade recess.
He was, in my eyes, great at all sports. We were the same height, the same age, similar build. Somehow though, when he swung his bat it made contact, and when he snapped his wrist there was a “swoosh” on the other end.
When I was nine years old he suggested swimming for the town team. To this day I don’t know why, except that maybe it was the early 90s and the pinnacle of being a good suburban kid was trying as many sports as humanly possible.
My mom dialed the phone and I could hear her chatting. Her face sunk.
“No, he can’t swim butterfly…but can’t you teach him?”
No.
I think about this a lot. What if we had just stopped there? What if I hadn’t proudly boasted that my wife and I would be perfect for each other the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2006.
What if I had missed out on swimming, something that I have loved ever since. In any case, I found a place to swim. A USS Swimming club that practiced a ten minute drive from my parents house. I had never done more than one lap in a row without stopping. We practiced three times a week for two hours at a time.
All I remember is how much my head and body ached every single day, for months. I remember an eight year old showing my nine year old ass how to do a flip-turn. I remember the day I broke a minute in the 50 yard freestyle.
My friend quit after a few weeks. He continued to play all the sports. I sputtered along with baseball for another year. With a year of swimming under my belt, my body transformed. I went from soft and awkwardly tall to what my age to my age group coach calling me “muscle-man”.
So when I showed up to little league at age 10, I suppose I looked 100% more like an athlete. But I couldn’t through, or catch, or hit. So swimming it was.
I don’t have a lot of happy memories of being a little kid. I remember liking going to swim practice, at least enough that I never begged out getting to go even if most of my problems were the same ones that I had at school. I felt constantly outside. Not fast enough, not cool enough, not tough enough.
At 13 I made it to my club’s “senior” team. I had such a miserable time that I nearly quit again. I was constantly late to practice (through no fault of my own). I had a coach who sat through most of practice, often eating two footlong subs while we plowed through thousands of yards.
I had a teammate that at age 18, we all knew he would park his car outside a 13 year old girl’s house and just linger. He was the fastest competitor on the team.
I escaped from that place only by chance. I had a teammate who had only recently escaped from a deeper circle of swimming hell, with a coach who now resides on the USA Swimming banned list. He suggested a third location for us to train.
I can say without a doubt that the best year I ever had swimming was the next year. It came at the perfect time in my youth. I didn’t feel out, I felt in. I felt fast, I felt like everyone was my friend, and I felt the rush of hard work.
Swimming didn’t just save my life from ever sinking into a body of water. It gave me a place where I could escape and be myself, and that being myself worked.
So sometimes, when I rail against the terrible things that are happening in swimming, it’s mostly because I see it as an existential threat to something I love dearly. Swimming doesn’t need to exist, but it does and I’m thrilled that it does. We need it to stay around to save many more lives.