My daughter Natalie is on the
varsity swim team at FDR High School, as an eighth grader. The team is small
and young – out of 16 swimmers on the team, 6 are in middle school. Despite
this, she remains a bit of a novice outlier on the team in that the other girls
swim year-round in club programs. This, of course, is not uncommon in swimming.
But Natalie is relatively new to the sport – she swam on a summer club team in
2014 for the first time, did it again this summer, and now has made the varsity
team; it’s all new to her, and to us.
She’s doing great. Practices
are grueling, but she seems to enjoy them. When I pick up her and two of her
middle-school swim teammate/friends (parents
of multiple busy-kid schedules survive on such carpooling), they regale me with
tales of the massive yardage they covered in the pool, and Natalie is so
ravenous she would eat the dashboard if it weren’t attached to the car. She
tears through bananas, pretzels, bags of chips, whatever she remembered to pack
prior to practice, and/or whatever is edible and not nailed down in the front
seat of the van.
The high school meets are
short compared to the summer meets, about two hours’ length more or less.
Because FDR has such a small team, Coach Sean (a great young coach, by the way) needs to double, triple or
quadruple his girls in terms of events in order to maximize points. For most of
the girls, accustomed to swimming 11 out of 12 months of the year, this is no
big deal. For Natalie, a relative newbie to the sport, it has been a bit
challenging to the point of being downright overwhelming. As she has developed
as a swimmer through these two-hour daily practices, Coach Sean has rightly
determined that Natalie’s strength is as a distance swimmer. Despite this, the
idea of doing multiple, sometimes long, events has been daunting for her.
The first such mental
challenge came a few weeks ago at New Paltz. She was asked to swim in a relay,
the backstroke and another relay. The first relay and backstroke were
back-to-back events. The second relay was just two events later. That’s a lot
of swimming in a short period of time, and oh by the way Natalie doesn’t like
the backstroke. But Coach Sean knew she could do it; Coach Sean needed her to
do it; she was going to do it. There was some anxiety; there were some tears.
But! She did it, and did it well.
The next meet, last Wednesday
at Poughkeepsie, provided an even bigger mental hurdle for her: the 500-yard
freestyle, the longest event on the high school meet docket. Natalie was a
wreck. She was dreading this day, all the while knowing it was coming. Her
stomach hurt, she said; it had been bothering her since seventh period, she
said; she really wanted to do the race, honest she did, but her stomach really
hurt. Ugh. This was truly heart wrenching. She’s your child and you want what’s
best for her; but my instincts told me she was suffering from a severe case of
the nerves: 500 yards is a long way to swim. Heck, I couldn’t make it to 50
yards without gulping and gagging on a liter of water. I calmly told her she
needed to go over to the other side of the pool, with her teammates and with her
coach. She needed to talk to Coach Sean. She talked to Coach Sean. Then she
came back to us. What did Coach Sean say, I asked. Varsity swim, kid, gotta do
it, she said he said. More tears. More anxiety. Ugh. What if she’s really not
feeling well?
Sometimes, you just have to
dive in and do it. She got in the pool. She started swimming, in lane 6. Nice
and methodical. Flip turns at times, no flips at others; remember, she’s still
new at this. She got through the 20 laps, in 7:39.43. In order to make the team
back in August, she needed to swim 500 yards in less than 9 minutes. With some
practice, she lowered her time from 8:48 down to 8:11 at her tryout. And now
many more seconds were lopped off. She was not overly competitive in the race,
but she held her own and scored points for her team. And then, about a half
hour later, she was back in the pool for a 100-yard leg in the freestyle relay.
Her split was only two seconds slower than her best in that event; distance
swimmer, indeed.
On the ride home, I asked Natalie
how she was doing. She was tired, but relieved. I explained that most likely her
stomach was upset because of nerves. She admitted to having a “feeling” that
Coach Sean would put her in the 500 free in this meet, and her feeling was
indeed accurate. So, she worked herself up into an emotional frenzy for hours
before the race. I explained to Natalie something that we as runners have known
for many, many years, and that is this: The
anticipation of discomfort is far worse than the discomfort itself. You
dread the dread. The idea of all those laps, in a small, cramped dungeon of a
pool with the echoes of parents, teammates and coaches reverberating off the
walls, was a scary proposition indeed. It freaked her out, totally. Her coach
knew she could do it; her coach made her do it; and she did it.
As runners, no matter how old
we are, those pre-race butterflies are always there. Doesn’t matter how new or
old you are to the sport, how fast or slow you are. The anticipation of the
discomfort of a hard-earned effort is far worse than the hard-fought effort
itself. Pre-race jitters are as old as racing itself (there’s a reason those
port-o-potty lines are usually pretty long at races). It a hard lesson to learn
for a very young and very new teenage swimmer. There may be more tears, more
bellyaches – real or imagined. But hopefully, when we all dive in to whatever
task that awaits us, the reward of the finished effort will have been worth the
anxiety of the anticipation of that effort.
