Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the essay “Rough Water” by David McGlynn (©2008 by David McGlynn).

One of my best races could hardly be called a race at all. I was a senior in high school, gunning to qualify for the USA Junior Nationals. The previous summer I had missed the cut by less than a second in the mile, and just the day before, at my high school regional meet, I had come within three-tenths of a second in the 500-yard freestyle. The qualification time was 4:39.69; I swam a 4:39.95. The next day, Sunday, I drove with my mother to the far side of Houston where a time trial was being held—an informal, unadvertised event thrown together at the last minute. The only races swum were those the swimmers requested to swim. Most were short, flapping sprints in which swimmers attempted to shave off a few one-hundredths of a second. I didn’t have the courage to face the mile, and since I’d struck out in the 500 the day before, I decided to swim the 1,000-yard freestyle. Forty lengths of the pool. It was a race I’d swum fast enough to believe that given the right confluence of circumstances—cold water, an aggressive heat, an energetic meet—I could make the cut, I had fifteen seconds to drop to qualify.

By the time I stood up on the blocks, I was not only the only one in the race, I was practically the only one in the natatorium. The horn sounded and I dove in. I was angry and disheartened at having missed the cut the day before and I had little belief that I could go any faster today.

About six hundred yards in, my coach started to pace. I stayed steady on, not in a hurry, not about to get my hopes up. In my mind, I had already missed the time. Then a boy from a rival high school, whom I hardly knew, unfolded his legs and climbed down from the bleachers and started to cheer. He squatted low to the water and pointed his finger toward the end of the pool, as if to say, That’s where you’re going, now hurry up. I thought, If he’s cheering, maybe I’m close.

Sometimes a moment comes along when the world slows down, and though everything else moves around us at the same frenetic speed, we’re afforded the opportunity to reflect in real-time rather than in retrospect. It is as though we slip into a worm-hole in the fabric of time and space, travel into the past and then back again to the present in the same instant. That morning, swimming, I remembered a day in late September the year before, the last day my swim team had use of an outdoor pool. All summer long my teammates and I swam under an open sky. After this day we would spend the rest of the season in a dank and moldy indoor pool.

The triangular backstroke flags were strung across the lanes and the adjacent diving well. My teammates liked to run down the long cement deck, jump out over the diving well, and try to grab hold of the line. Many of them could jump far enough to make it. I could not, though I tried every day. I tried that day, and missed. Since I would not have another shot until May, I decided to try again. I squared up and ran, my feet wet against the pavement, and just as my foot hit the water’s edge, one of my teammates called out “Jump!” I bent my knees and pushed off hard and got my hand around the flag line. I pulled the whole thing into the water. Autumn was coming and I wondered if there was a metaphor in what I had just done; a fortune folded inside a cookie: my greatest effort would come when I was down to my last opportunity.

Now it was March and I was down to my last opportunity, thinking about that day and hearing the word “jump!” as my eyes followed the finger of the boy pointing me onward. What I understood—not later, but right then, in the water—was how little this swim added up to in the world, I had spent more than a year training for this one swim, and when it was finished the world would be no different than before it began. If no one else cared, then the swim was mine alone. It mattered because it was the task before me now, the thing I wanted now. Swimming, I had long understood, is a constant choice between the now and the later: exhaustion now for the sake of fitness later, all those Friday nights spent in the pool in pursuit of an end that seemed always one step farther on. I was out of laters, this was the end, and I made my choice. I cashed in the energy I set aside for climbing out of the pool and unfolding my towel and tying my shoes. I’ve never sprinted harder in my life, not before and not since. I hit the wall. I knew by instinct, by the spasm of my tendons and the ache in my bones, before I ever turned toward the clock or heard my coach scream, that I had made it.