You can take the girl out of the swim team, but her hair will still smell like chlorine in December.
I went swimming this morning. My once-giddy enthusiasm for the pool at my gym has tempered into a respectable 3–4 sessions a month, which honestly suits me fine. Any more than that and my neck starts creaking, my hairdresser stages an intervention, and the repetitive laps begin to gnaw at me like some chlorinated punishment. Swimming laps is like twiddling your thumbs—except you’re twiddling your whole damn body.
So once a week, I suit up for an hour of leisurely freestyle punctuated by the occasional burst of backstroke. Backstroke has always been my favorite stroke, and I physically cannot do it slowly. My arms windmill like turbines, hands slicing into the water pinky-first—clean entry, maximum drag. I learned that pinky-entry trick from my first swim coach around age 8. “Don’t slap your hands into the water,” she’d scold. She spent most of her time correcting my form, but that one tip stuck. It made me a backstroker.
I can usually tell who else in the pool swam competitively as a kid. Most people learn how to swim. We learned how to suffer… through 5 a.m. practices, silly kill and drills, and the scent of permanent chlorine damage.
You can spot us. We don’t slow down at the wall. We glide—compact kicks, even strokes, breath timed like a metronome. We don’t think about the seconds passing, because our bodies already know the pace. We can always go one more lap. Always. That reserve? It’s muscle memory—and a little trauma.
Our kicks come from the hips. We’ll hold our breath if you ask. Our wake is steady and stubborn, like a schooner. Or maybe a grudge.
