Swimming it All Away

Four o’clock in the morning is a dismal hour for parents of swimmers.

There is the chore of waking yourself, extracting the child from their bed, driving them to the pool in the dark and then trying to balance whether to fall back to sleep in the car or power through. What is harder is sleeping through your alarm, waking at 6:30 am in a panic, only to realize that the child now sets her own alarm, feeds herself and drives alone to the pool.

The question is no longer who, but what drives her?  There is no swim scholarship at the other end of the pool.  No fame, no riches.

None of that matters to her, just the satisfaction of how she feels getting out of the water after a practice or at the end of a race.  

As she wrote in one of her college essays:  “My team has become my family, the pool has become my second home, and the scent of the chlorine has become my new perfume.”

The pool is not always warm and welcoming, but in a world where there is so much communication, so many signals, so much vying for our kids’ attention, so much to do, she finds comfort under water.  

For two hours a day she has no cell phone to grab, no Snapchat streaks to contend with, no videos to like or pictures to share.  No one is calling for her attention except the water, the wall and her now-quiet mind.

There is something about the simplicity of it all that draws her in.  The rules are black and white, like the lines at the bottom of the pool.  There is a start and a stop, a beginning and an end, complete clarity, even under the murky water.

But the times improved and with it the awards and the confidence and it became a part of her.  She was a lot of things, but she was a swimmer first.  Years of leaving parties early on Saturday nights so she could get up early for Sunday practice, coming late and leaving early to endless family vacations, impossibly early mornings all conspired to form the core of who she is.

This is not a story that ends poorly with heartache or injury.  It ends the way high school ends with a final meet, improvements that come in tenths of seconds, tears for what's over, and wonder about what's next.