Lessons from the pool deck

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.