The Worst Good Swimmer

For most of my life I have thought of myself as a very slow swimmer. I swam on teams throughout my childhood, and while I was fast enough to qualify for the teams, I never won a meet. I had a sort of love-hate relationship with the pool. I loved being in the pool, but I hated doing laps. So I did them slowly. Which didn't win me any love from my swim coaches.

When I was 14 I quit the swim team just to see if I could do it. I'd been on a swim team since I was 5; I think I thought that the world might just implode if a season passed without my participation on a team. To my surprise, the world went right on without me. The swim team went to meets and I went to Intramural Fitness, which was where everyone at school who hadn't made a team went. I don't remember a lot of fitness being accomplished there. I think mostly we sat around pretending to stretch.

Fourteen years later I joined another swim team, this one a Masters team because at that point I was too old for anything else. I didn't know anyone in New York, and had just broken up with my boyfriend. We'd joined the team together because he wanted to train for the swim around Manhattan (yes, there really is such a thing). When we broke up I got the swim team. He left and joined another team that swam fifteen blocks south. He went on to compete in the Manhattan Island Swim, which gave him a serious upper respiratory infection. And I went on to swim with the team for four seasons. Still, I was as slow as a wounded jellyfish. I missed qualifying for nationals by one-tenth of a second. This sounds impressive, but it's not. I think most people qualify for nationals.

Then last week I found my milieu when I joined the Park Slope YMCA. Milo is taking swim classes there, so I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to get back in the pool - I could go half an hour before Milo's class, swim laps, and then get back in the pool with Milo. Also, that way Milo would see me swimming, and thus might come to understand that the point of being in the pool is to swim, not to stand around and sing London Bridge (which is what he might assume from his swim class).

The first day I got in the pool I wasn't sure which lane to choose. There are three: slow, medium and fast. There were three people in the slow lane, all of whom looked like they were one step away from drowning, so I went with the medium lane. There was one guy in there doing laps. I got in and in a matter of moments I'd passed him. I switched to breast stroke, which is a lot slower than crawl. I passed him again.

The next time I got in the pool I opted for the fast lane. And again, I found myself lapping everyone else in the lane. Clearly, what had been missing from my swimming career was total incompetence. I'd been mistakenly swimming with people who could actually swim. The other people on my Masters team had been former national competitors. The people at the Park Slope YMCA took a swim class once. And with them as my competition, I am finally the fastest swimmer. I'm better than the fastest swimmer. My strokes, compared to the other swimmers, are professional. I look like I know what I'm doing. I can do flip turns. I am, quite simply, awesome.