By SwimSwam Contributors on SwimSwam
Courtesy: Charles Hartley
Just over 53 years ago I competed in the season finale of Divisional Championship Meet for the Mohican Hills Swimming Pool in Bethesda, Maryland.
I was 10 years old on the 8th of August in 1973, long before my high school baseball teammate and friend died in a car accident, long before my Mom and Dad died, long before I got Ds on college exams, long before I got fired from jobs for incompetence or socially annoying behaviors or both, long before winning a student-athlete award in high school, long before landing on the Dean’s List in college, long before becoming a Dad and Grand Dad, long before understanding what life was really going to be like.
I have nice feeling and recollections of August 8th, 1973. The zenith of childhood carefreeness that was. Sunny. Warm. Beautiful. Classic August vibe. Swim season was over; soon driving away to the beach with the family for a few weeks.
After the meet beside the sparkling baby blue pool, my Mom took a photo of me in my red, white, and blue American Flag-like Speed-O. I had won two third-place medals and was proudly holding them up for the shot, my smile one of those that truly happy young boys can’t fake. Earning medals was a first for me and a thrill. This was the big meet where we competed for medals not just ribbons like for the regular season meets.
Placing third meant in the entire league against 12 others in the nine and ten age group, I came in third fastest in the 50-meter freestyle and 25-meter backstroke.
I know that may sound pretty irrelevant right now, and not all that impressive considering our team competed in Division H of the Montgomery County Swimming League. The faster teams competed in Divisions A or B or C.
But I remember that day now because I felt proud to have done as well as I did in a sport where I often didn’t finish first. In early regular season meets that season some kid or kids touched the wall before me. The top swimmer I was not.
Unfamiliar experiences these were, a bit jarring, because in football, basketball and baseball I often was the best.
But not in swimming. Swimming humbled me and taught me more about life than all other sports. Practices felt kind of like body torture. Other sports I played exhilarated; swimming hurt. At 7 am when I would rather have been in bed, I would go to practice and get in the water when I didn’t want to and swim laps like the rest of the team. A bunch of those kids were better swimmers. I felt like an outlier, not really part of the pool clique.
Swimming practice wasn’t enjoyable. I remember thinking with my head underwater that I just wanted to breathe more often, to get out of the pool, to leave practice. Shoulders ached. Standing next to the pool in his Speed-O, coach kept blowing his whistle urging me and others to swim more laps – faster than the last one.
More laps. He always wanted more laps.
“Keep going, this is supposed to be hard if you want to get faster,” I kind of remember him saying or something similar.
Was this supposed to be fun? Why did my Mom sign me up for this?
It wasn’t pleasurable to learn I wasn’t the best at everything nor destined to be.
Later in life – for the rest of my life – I learned I wasn’t the best at pretty much anything I did. I wasn’t the best student in grade school, high school, college, or graduate school. I wasn’t the highest performing employee. Still am not, 40 years later. Other employees won awards and got promotions – instead of me — more times than I would like to think about.
Along this life-long journey I won some awards, too, some stellar annual performance reviews, but those honors, at least to me, have felt too infrequent. And when they happened I tended to reason that I received those recognitions for something other than because I deserved them. I didn’t believe I was the best even when I was being told I was.
So why bring this up?
There have been times when I have been the best, for a moment or a week or whatever. But those moments don’t last especially in the working world. The wins always seem to be followed quickly with another second- or tenth- or whatever-not-first place. A criticism from a boss, someone questioning my judgement and technical acumen. A boss telling me I’m not what he needs. Writing something that someone else marks up in red pen with these words I can’t stand receiving: “This is not clear.”
So swimming was my indoctrination into not being the best. And I’ve been experiencing that again and again ever since. This is not a complaint or a regret. It’s an observation. It’s candor. Why can’t all of us start being more candid about how we really feel and stop holding it in out of fear of who knows what? Why not let out our emotions?
I wish this weren’t so.
Today I feel all these emotions and one other: appreciation. All these 53 years later – more than five decades ago — I am glad I swam on that team and didn’t win first place all the time and went through practices I didn’t like. It prepared me to endure a lot of other things I’ve done in my life I didn’t want to nor enjoy.
Had I been the best swimmer that year, I may not have learned about losing young enough and it would have been harder to deal with than it has been.
Swimming taught me I had shortcomings. All of us find this out sooner or later. And it’s a good thing to learn we’re not great at everything when we’re young.
When we know we could be better, that others are better, we strive to get better ourselves as I did during that swimming season, as I am right now typing these words, aspiring to be better at this craft called writing that I chose to dedicate my life to soon after graduating from college.
Without the swimming experience of 53 years ago, I may not be sitting here this Saturday morning in a dimly lit corporate office with not a person around, noise non-existent, thinking about finishing in third place, wanting to touch the wall first again.
But knowing, because life experiences has given me wisdom, that becoming number one would not be as gratifying as the pursuit of the goal. I am aware that doing what I’m doing right now, trying to get better, hoping to produce a first-place-worthy piece of art, is victory.
Whether it is or it isn’t the best according to anyone else, I feel like I have won.
About Charles Hartley
Charles Hartley is a freelance writer based in Davidson, NC. He has a masters degree in journalism and a masters degree in business administration.
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