I have my own lane in the pool, I am laboring through a long set, straining to keep my stroke rate consistent, my turns strong, despite the exhaustion that grows with each lap. As the hour mark approaches, the tension builds, my shoulders feel heavier, weaker, and every gulp of air comes with urgency. But the key is to detach from the immediate sensation of overwhelming fatigue, to simply experience the exhaustion of my body from a distance, which is a sensation that I, at least sometimes, can savor.
A large group of children jump and screech and splash in the shallow end just outside my lane. Although I usually prefer swimming in the morning with the lap swimmers, it is the afternoon, and I’m sharing the pool with a class who, I believe, is enjoying the water more than me. At this moment I am resting between sets, wishing that my mouth was larger so that I could consume more air, looking into the distance, a bit irritated by the dwindling seconds on the clock that measures my rest.
“What’s your name?”
I turn my head to the right, confused by the words. It takes a moment, but I decipher them with a delay.
“I’m Charles, and you?”
“What?”
She’s about six, and she’s struggled over to my lane line, fighting the ripples that, to her, are waves. She’s adorned with everything that you can possibly imagine: two red floaties on her arms, an inflatable ring around her waist, large goggles on her eyes, a colorful swim cap, a giant snorkel that dangles from a strap around her head, and she’s somehow holding two toy rings. She’s afloat, barely, unable to touch the bottom, but completely untroubled. A larger smile amid her battle to stay upright wouldn’t have been possible.
“I’m Zoey.”
“Hello Zoey, it is nice to meet you,” I say, a little apprehensive about the appearance of this scene, needing to form those words amid my exhales.
“I don’t know anybody named Charles”—and, in what seemed to be the logical conclusion of that fact—“want to be friends?”
I couldn’t resist perceiving this chat from a distance, as seen by the group of adults in the bleachers: the only adult man in the pool, speaking with a six year old girl in the spot that just happens to be the farthest from the adults. My glassesless eyes can’t see that far, and I don’t know whether looking toward them or ignoring them appears more concerning. But I do tell her that we can be friends.
“Let’s race.”
Zoey, it turns out, is rather confident in her abilities. Her large smile contains a childlike confidence, a sense of sureness and exploration that I can’t help but admire.
The pool occupies a very specific place inside my mind, one that I’ve learned to associate over time with labor and training and competition. After so many years of swimming, the smell of chlorine, bleach, the cold deck tiles, the unmistakable pings of sound that can only come from a specific environment, triggers a particular mood, one that isn’t prone to relaxation, or mere floating, and that’s focused, whenever there’s water, on reaching the other side. Which isn’t, I should add, a unique experience, or even a complaint, as this seems a fairly commonplace result for competitive swimmers. The pool is freeing, yes, it is as freeing as a blank page, it has limitless potentiality and an absence of rules, so that when I dive and swim a long, gliding lap underneath the water the entire world drops from my mind and there’s nothing but silence. There are no longer any coaches, sets begin when I decide, yet I still, it seems, only know how to race.
“I’m about to swim. You can too,” I tell her. “I’m going to swim and then I’ll rest again.”
“Ready, set,” and she’s off, the little cheater.
From a distance I hear a woman call to Zoey, having walked onto the deck with urgency. I’m not sure whether I’m thankful because I want to swim, or if I’m unnerved because of the potential for an insinuation, or if I’m annoyed because I want to live in a community with more trust, where children can remain fearless and able to explore in just the same way that I feel free in the water, though I know that isn’t this world.
Even though the pool might appear to be a restrictive, exclusive location, where only those of a certain ability and background and even class can attend, you’ll actually find a hodgepodge of people, an entire ecosystem of humans that stretches beyond typical group boundaries and in many ways resembles a bit of a zoo. There are more competitive swimmers, of course, but there are dilettantes, too, the people who don’t come too often and who aren’t too comfortable in the water and who have cumbersome strokes but who still want some good exercise. So you end up with every type of body in the pool, from those who resemble the figures of a Greek sculpture to those who resemble the corpulence of a Fernando Botero character. And with water such a fundamental part of life, the place from which our evolutionary story begins, the substance so necessary for our existence, it is appropriate that the age range in the pool is from a few months after birth until, it seems, a few months before death.
Regardless of the age, however, there shouldn’t be any intimidation, as the majority of swimmers are just striving to cross the pool, with a good portion of lap swimmers giving you doubts about whether they’ll accomplish that goal. Most people follow the standard strokes, not necessarily in the most efficient manner but with enough technique to nudge them forward. And there’s always at least a few creative swimmers who manage to invent their own strokes, which I find exhausting to watch, as it usually means that the exertion required has gone up while the speed that’s achieved has gone down.
Yet I do appreciate seeing people try, and I support a crowded pool, regardless of the level, as long as there’s an awareness of other swimmers. Most people know to stay close to swimmers with similar abilities, and I understand that very few people started swimming in the frightening hierarchy of competitive lane assignments with grown men that I experienced as a young boy, but I’m still a little perturbed by people who are oblivious to floating in a lane with sprinters or, I should add, to those who begin sprinting in a lane where people are floating. Although not officially a crime, I see no reason why the prisons can’t accommodate those who fail to recognize the parameters of the lane that they’ve joined.
Compared with most sports, there’s an isolating aspect to swimming, an awareness that it really is just about your body and your desires and that nothing else really matters. Even in a competition, your main opponent is the ticking clock, the metronome beat that’s maddeningly objective and indifferent and relentless, rather than other swimmers. All that matters, really, is your time relative to your previous time, and that’s especially true when you consider that there’s an infinitesimal distinction between swimmers. Most people are aware that a fraction of a second marks the distinction between first place and last place in competitions, but they’re probably less aware that it’s only another second to reach the thousandth competitor. And in that crucible, it is probably best to measure yourself against yourself, regardless of your current situation, age, or ability, which makes the isolation and individuality of swimming very much like life.
Yet many people are still reluctant. They don’t want to be near the pool. Either they don’t like swimming—regardless of your capacity, it is still difficult—or they feel unsafe, uncertain, unfamiliar, around the water. You can perceive this reluctance in the hesitant steps that people take on a pool deck. Or in how their muscles tighten when they swim. In the jerky, speculative strokes. In those moments you can spot the appearance of someone who is too close to a ledge, when the sudden possibility of a descent into the unknown has overtaken any comfort of the known.
Nevertheless, it is possible to be confident in the water. You can reach a place that’s expansive, even freeing, while you swim. Perhaps the first step, long before you’ve learned the techniques of propulsion, is to cultivate a taste for the uncertainty that’s sure to arrive. And that’s an orientation that you can possess—to relish what’s confusing, precarious, even dangerous. To appreciate the exhaustion of your muscles, the scream of your body while you continue to stroke.
Hesitation is perfectly natural when confronted with a struggle. It seems logical and is certainly the result of a few million years worth of nervous system refinements that compel you to conserve energy and avoid the unknown. But I do think there’s value in willing yourself to push beyond that first impulse, consciously, to relish those moments of discomfort. And it does feel so good and potent and freeing to believe that you’re the only person in the entire world while you propel yourself atop the water. That you’re able to do anything at all as everyone else dissolves from your mind, when there’s nothing beyond your beating heart and the necessity to gasp for air. It comes with the largest smile, and its exploratory, limitless nature gives you the sensation, I believe, of childhood.
Saying that I am a reluctant swimmer would be generous, Charles. I used to swim when I was little and I remember that it used to be fun. It wasn't reluctant back then. Much like Zoey, I often was guilty of entering into the lanes of other swimmers. Then I swam again in my late teens, just before college. I remember making big progress. I'd swim everyday for a few months. And then I stopped, again, for college. More recently, I just couldn't bring myself to swim to cross a river. More than the current, it was the fish that scared me, I think. I surely miss that childlike confidence that I used to have while swimming.
Thanks for this piece, Charles. It triggered lots of good memories from my childhood.
Beautifully written, Charles. Brought back memories of swimming in college, with friends far more advanced than I was. And the thrill of finally developing a decent flip turn.