Why I Swim : Part I

This post was supposed to be simple: why swimming has been beneficial in healing my body and mind throughout postpartum. (And why anyone, everyone, all body types should seriously start considering jumping in a pool.. I’m a pool advocate, we will get there in time.) Here’s the thing, being an ex-competitive swimmer makes my relationship with the sport complicated. I feel like Rachel McAdams in the Notebook screaming, “IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE”. Because, it’s not. I swam for nearly two decades competitively, during formative years when my understanding of self and community were being formed. 

My body to this day still has the imprints of swimming from my adolescent years: broad shoulders and a wide rib cage from expanded lungs. When it came time to “retire” I felt like I was giving up a large facet of my identity, but it also felt like a bad break up. I think most competitive swimmers go through a separation season from the pool, some eventually return while others choose retirement for good. I am among the ones that returned but it has taken a lot of mental gymnastics and Christ healing to get here. 

This first post is my history with swimming, how its enmeshment with my life brought answered prayers but also fatigue and finally why I left the sport. The second post is the slow story of how I returned to the water and why I want others to come join. 

Kelsey (left) my middle sister, Cobb (middle) my oldest sister, and me. I believe this is at the end of my freshmen year at Belmont Plaza (RIP).

Let’s rewind to the beginning, I started swimming when I was two/three years old? The fable goes, I jumped into a pool during my oldest sister’s summer league swim meet when I was still in diapers. The lifeguard, a coach and both my parents jumped in the pool to grab me before they realized I was bobbing contentedly on a lane line. I loved the water. I loved the energy on the pool deck, the smell of chlorine… it was all gold to me.

Fast forward to summer league in California when I was 6, the coach encouraged my mom to put me in year round swimming. Which she did. I swam year round up until a month before my 16th birthday. By this time I had made Junior Olympic, Junior National and All American times. I had grown to know my body, how to care for it through discipline and practice… so much practice. I had missed weeks of school for cross country trips and had teammates tracking for Olympic Trial cuts (if only I had had the heart.) I loved being a teammate but I hated the pre-practice nerves. The pre-meet jitters were even worse and it didn’t matter how experienced or “good” I became, they were always there. Because of this constant level of anxiety I began to dread the pool.

The one thing combating the dread was knowing I had friends with me at my side during the worst days, or sets.

Swimming also was a safe place from home, or rather it was a place to escape and feel normal-ish. Home life during my elementary years up through freshman year were not easy. There were financial issues, alcoholism, mental disorders… and all the emotional side effects that come from such a potent cocktail. Finally the dam broke and the summer before sophomore year things rightfully fell apart. I’ve never known what came first, my parents decision to divorce or the financial strain our family was in. I experienced my first life overhaul. We would need to move, extracurricular activities would need to change and I quit swimming. 

After so many years of repetition and grueling routine, quitting swimming was a shock to the system. At first the freedom was liberating and I was amazed by how many hours existed after school. Or rather how dry my hair could actually get. I realized for the first time, I hated swimming for its competitive nature. Even teammates at the end of the day felt like enemies because you would have to swim against one another in heats, it was lonely. But I missed the camaraderie of practice and the buzz of swim meets.

I missed feeling a part of something even if it was individualist at its core. I was conflicted about the sport but I knew I missed the water.

Those three remaining years of high school are hard to parse out, even to this day I’m surprised by how much loss I feel from those years. Swimming among the count. Sometime in my junior year I started swimming by myself in a pool at my dad’s apartment complex. It was half an attempt to “train” for the high school season the coming spring but I was also trying to lose weight. Since quitting swimming the previous fall, my body had ballooned. Even though I had stopped swimming, my appetite had not. Also the intense training had kept puberty at bay and overnight my body changed from a 10 year old boy’s to a 16 year old woman’s… as it should have.

Part of the high school swim team (again RIP Belmont Plaza)

The swim season came and went and I was so ashamed in how far behind I had slid from my club friends and their times. I wanted to do better for my senior year. I started running and swimming consistently on my own, I started eating “healthier” and even began dreaming about life beyond the spring season of my senior year. I knew I wanted to get away from the mess, from Southern California. I knew college was my way out but I also knew my academic performance the past few years had taken a nosedive. I never considered swimming for college. My older sister had quit after her freshman year because she wanted to focus on her studies and major. She had given me fair warning.

I applied to eight schools and was waitlisted to one, accepted to seven. I sat down with my dad and he jokingly asked how I was going to pay for tuition.

We talked about the possibility of me swimming for college and I went back to see if any of the schools I was accepted to had teams. Five did. Two had Division III which meant zero scholarship opportunities. But three were Division II, and they were all in the PNW. We flew up to visit the schools in April and I essentially cold called all three coaches. In the end, Seattle University could support me the most with contingencies based on future performance. A few weeks after signing I found out SU would be transitioning to Division I, the transfer would be staged through the course of four years.

Swimming for college was rough, it was like dancing at the end of a wedding when your feet hurt, you’re exhausted and all you want is a bed. I felt old and jaded and worst of all fake. I felt like I didn’t belong there and the guilt of knowing my heart wasn’t really in it anymore hung around me like a bad smell. Some of my teammates became my roommates junior and senior year and to this day I give thanks for them, for putting up with me during those years.

I made it three years and then threw in the towel. For a myriad of reasons I will share soon, the shortened version simply is, it was time. I wanted one year to just be a student. Go to class, go to church, get healthy and simplify life. After that, I swore off my cap and goggles and pools for a near seven years. During those years I turned to my running shoes for solace and found immense peace from the lack of structure. No intervals, no sets, no set destinations.

But once a swummer, always a swimmer. The muscle memory does something to your body, as much as I loved running I began having swimmer dreams. Dreams where all I would be doing was swimming freestyle lap after lap, no counting, no intervals. So I started swimming the next week. I found a pool in the basement of a YWCA just a few blocks away from my work in downtown Seattle. It had three lanes, slow - medium - fast. It was perfect. 

I began swimming in the mornings before work, once, maybe twice a week if I was feeling ambitious. A battle that I had long fought had come to an end. I could be in a pool and not feel anxious or combative, I didn’t need to perform. I could just show up and move, relax and allow my breathing to take me away to a place of prayer and reflection. I did not know then, but this was God’s hand shutting an old door and allowing a new one to open. He is so good. He turned something that once brought tears and pain into an instrument I would rely on in the future for protection and hope.