Swimmers, To Your Marks

Sometimes I can only stand back and admire the bravery of my children. A day after Kelly won a league championship in a sport she had never played four months ago, Michael participated in his first swim meet five weeks after starting pre-season practices as essentially a non-swimmer. I hated swimming as a kid and still have bad memories of the one week I was forced to take swimming lessons when I was about Michael's age. In a cruel turn of fate, we joined a swim club and signed Michael up for an actual swim team even though he could swim no better than I could at the same age. I would have hated me if I were my own dad!

This is a swimming-mad area. Each little community has multiple swim clubs, which compete with each other throughout the summer. As hard as it is to believe, swimming is a bigger deal than soccer and baseball. Moving in across the street from one of the swim clubs, joining the club was almost compulsory, but we had no idea we would become involved with the swim team. Too many people we met enthusiastically recommended it as a great time for kids and parents alike, though, so we took a chance that Michael would be able to overcome his beginner status to at least have a good time and become water-safe.

Today's event was time trials, an event for our club alone in which the swimmers could set their baseline times for the season. The neighborhood was packed with SUVs and minivans, and the lanes were full of kids warming up smoothly.




As the season-opening event, the coaches organized a pep-rally for the swimmers and their parents to pump everyone up.


Michael was understandably anxious. Given that he has never made it more than halfway down the 25-meter pool without stopping, and has only learned backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly within the last two weeks, I may have been more anxious than he was, worried about how he would feel about struggling in front of several hundred people.

I needn't have worried. The kid has plenty of competitive fire and toughness in reserve.

Michael took the starting position very seriously, even though it resulted in an inelegant belly flop (a technique he shared with many of the younger or less experienced kids).


Hitting the water for the first time all day, Michael made it all the way down the pool in freestyle, even beating one of the kids in his heat. He was not fast, but neither was he painfully slow, and he did not even come close to stopping. He also did not demand to go home. Considering that he had no idea how to breathe while swimming a month ago, that's a tremendous accomplishment. He followed that result with a slow but complete breaststroke heat, and a meandering (but complete!) backstroke. Toward the end of the afternoon, he turned in a very promising fly leg, again beating one of the other kids in his heat. None of his swims were fast, but the mere fact that they happened is a major achievement. And he knew it.