There were two kinds of teams: summer recreational teams and year-round club teams. I loved the summer rec swimming. The pool was outdoors, filled with kids and sharp sunlight. Fun happened there. Our swim meets were surrounded with neighborhood families, hot dogs and red vines.
The year-sound teams were serious. Large, indoor pools with a dense, cloying atmosphere and hard work. It was hard to breathe there.
My coach and I, during a meet, were going over my upcoming race—the hundred-yard freestyle. This was normally when he’d remind me of strategy, turns, kick off the wall, head forward. Things known but a few bullet points.
Instead he said, “You’ll never get it. You’re never going to break a minute.”
I was 12 years old and in the tilt of his chin, I was dismissed. Nothing more to say.
I was shocked and felt defeated before I began. I headed over to the starting blocks. The area was all elbows and skin. The bald caps of swimmers in various stages of warming up. I kept playing back the hard look of his eyes. The swift was I was discarded, like an empty lunch sack.
What was I doing here?
When I first started the year-round swimming I wouldn’t swim in the meets—too competitive. I wanted the workouts and to improve my swimming but not the pressures of racing. Eventually the coaches pushed me to engage fully with the team and those races. But it had been this—the idea I wasn’t somehow living up to my potential—I’d been trying to avoid. This moved out of the realm of fun and into proving my worth.
I was far away from the time when I loved swimming. Back in those summer leagues. When I broke the record for the eight-year-old twenty-five-yard butterfly—I was hooked. With my name emblazoned on the Records board, there was no turning back.
In those summer leagues, my young coach invited me to swim workouts with the older kids. At first, I swam with ten- and twelve-year-olds, then worked my way up to swim with the fourteen-year-olds and then the seventeen-year-olds.
As the years progressed, I’d swim three to four hours a day. Just for fun. This coach also invited me to swim workouts with her. First, first thing in the morning. No one else in the pool. I was rarely able to get myself up that early, but a few glorious times I did.
I’d ride my bike down to the pool in the early morning quiet. Darkness, light easing in, slicing through low waves and stillness. I’d swim her workout. No sound except heart beats in my ears.
But eventually I realized to really get good at swimming you’ve got to swim year-round. That was the carrot for me—I wanted to get better.
For a brief time on that year-round team, I had fun. I swam with a set of twins. They played games—dove down to the bottom of the pool, hid underneath the swimmers, tickled someone’s feet. They laughed. No one really laughed in these workouts. It was serious work. But after a while, we were all chastised for not taking it seriously enough.
Our coach was tall and lean with a sharp, bald head. He showed us how he wanted us to swim. Laid the points of our strokes: position one, two, three and four. Trim jeans and a sweater no matter how hot it was in there. He stood impervious to what was around him. From the side of the pool, his long frame took us through the stations of the strokes. Almost beautiful.
In the first position, the elbow was high, lifting out at a ninety-degree angle as it moved forward. Hand in tight, brushing past the ear. The second position was an extension of the entire arm out in front, long and reaching. Get more water, more room. Imagine climbing and reaching for something higher. Third, was cupping the hand and wrist and pulling it underneath one’s body—S shaped—so that we moved over the water. This was the most important—move over the water, not through it. More power. Fourth, with the momentum gathered from the underwater pull, flick the wrist down by the thigh. Push through the end, into the air, then start over. Forehead facing the water’s edge for sprints. Precise, strong, and indeed beautiful.
He wanted more dedication from me—rather than my three-days-a-week workouts, he had wanted five. Some weeks he wanted twice-a-day workouts, as though life itself existed at the pool, instead of this being one singular spoke in a great revolving wheel.
We had mottos on our team. Two emblazoned on my memory: A Winner Never Quits and a Quitter Never Wins; A Day without Pain is a Day without Gain. After a particularly difficult set we’d have to get out the pool—red-faced and dripping—sit in a circle and tell the group our slowest time. He’d record these in a log. He told us, you’re never better than your slowest time. He didn’t want one good try; we weren’t capturing the fastest time, a once-off effort. He wanted us full tilt the entire set. Maximum output and steadiness. That’s why he recorded our slowest time.
When he was disappointed in us, we had to recite the mottos out loud. We were a small army of brainwashed swimmers.
Those mottos rang through all parts of my life—not just swimming. School, homework, other activities. A day without pain is a day without gain. Be tougher. Work harder. Forever.
As much as I hated it. I also believed it.
I stopped playing with those twins. I got serious. I moved ahead—up the lanes of our hierarchy.
When he said, you’ll never break a minute, I saw that I wasn’t valuable to him. I didn’t matter. I was only as valuable as what I could do for him.
I stood there silently, but I wondered, how could you know what I am capable of?
I swam my race that day and broke a minute. A solid 59 seconds and a few tenths. I thought, at least I did that. See what he thinks of that.
What he said to me was, “So that’s what you needed,” smug, nodding like I was a box he had figured out how to open.
I wanted his approval so desperately, wanted him to see me—be impressed with me. I confused that smug, nodding look with approval. And to get those brief moments, I overrode all my other feelings.
I couldn’t find the door that would let me out of this place.
A quitter never wins, a winner never quits. The mottos were in my way; they rattled through my brain. I could always talk myself out of leaving the team. Don’t be a quitter. A quitter never wins. I thought these were universal truths. A kind of treasure map I’d been given to a good life.
They also fit with a way of being in my family. My physician father lived his own version of a day without pain is a day without gain.
As a young man my dad had injured his back. He was determined this would not prevent him from being out in the woods or on a mountain. When he skied, he wore a back brace cinched so tight the loose skin fell over the top of it. When he peeled off that velcroed corset at the end of the day, deep red gouges marked his frame.
When his back was so bad he couldn’t carry a backpack, he built a contraption for himself. It had a front bike tire and two long poles extended behind with a canvas sling bridging the two. Something like an elongated wheelbarrow. He’d lay his pack in the sling so he could carry all the weight in his arms and muscled legs.
He called it The Wheel and we took it up switchbacks and slopes and across rivers on felled trees.
He was unstoppable. A girl who has a father like that does not quit things. And she doesn’t quit just because it’s hard.
What I wasn’t thinking about was that he loved the mountains. He felt the most alive there. Maybe not unlike the way I had loved swimming in the outdoor summer pool.
Was I feeling alive here?
I was counting to get through my time. Trying not to cry. I’d count down through the seventy-five-minute workout. I got good at fractions. One-tenth is seven and a half minutes. Two tenths, also one-fifth, is fifteen minutes—just five of those. I counted and divided my time into smaller and smaller bits until it was over. Didn’t feel a thing.
One day, I finally decided I’d had enough. I’d been sick for two weeks and discovered how much I enjoyed just plain old living. Not getting over the massive hurdle of a morning workout each day. I couldn’t keep fulfilling their dream of who they wanted me to be—what they wanted from me. I was living by the reflection I saw in their eyes, but it wasn’t me.
I sat up in my parents’ bedroom and called my coach on the phone. He was someone so removed, powerful, distant. To me, it felt like talking to God, not some man—a husband perhaps, or a father. I had no idea of his own life. To me, to us, the team was one-hundred percent swimming. A job.
“Um, hi, it’s Maureen.” My heart was pounding so hard, I was sweating in my t shirt.
“I wanna quit the team,” shaky, uneven voice.
“Oh, I see…, you’ve decided?”
“Yeah.” Squirming in the vastness of silence, using every muscle fiber to keep my mouth shut. Don’t say anything. Don’t give in.
That was it.
I had quit. And somehow the sky hadn’t opened up and swallowed me whole.
What I finally learned was I’d never find my way out of all those bad feelings. I’d been waiting for something to happen—to feel better; to feel worse. But the bad feelings—like the mottos themselves—made circular trails in my mind, looping back on myself, and I could never get out.
But I could make use of the ways he showed us how to swim—the powerful moves. I’d need to pull myself over the water—over the circular thoughts and the dismissal of my feelings and stop trying to get through them. I’d never get through them all. It’d be like trying to swim through all the water.
I had to go over them. Make a powerful move and get out.
So I did.