swimming in lane six

When I was a senior in high school, I joined swim team.

It was a weird thing to do. I’d never swum (swam? swimmed? Google says swum…) competitively before… I’d never even done laps. I was out of shape and years behind most of the kids on the team, many of whom had been swimming on teams since they could read. I didn’t have the lithe swimmer’s physique that they all had.

But I had the other seniors in Lane Six. There were three of us. As far as I know, we were all trying swim team for our first time. We all lacked the training and skill and talent of the rest of the team. The coaches stuck us in the last lane: lane six. While the rest of the fast swimmers were doing their workouts, we got the modified version. The coaches tried to teach us better form and complicated things like flip turns and the butterfly stroke. (I managed flip turns, if ungracefully. I tried fly. Really hard. But it was atrocious.) We had to compete, so we did freestyle sprints, because it posed the lowest risk of drowning. I’m pretty sure we each lost every heat.

As I write it, the story sounds cringeworthy and utterly painful. But senior year swim team is actually one of my most cherished memories of high school. My friends and I struggled and choked our way through the workouts, but we were doing it together. It taught me that failure isn’t so big a deal. As long as I’m getting air, it’s good enough. Doing my best really does matter, even if my best is worse than everyone else’s by a long way. We laughed at each other and ourselves. We got strong. We got tired. We got really, really sore.

I learned that there isn’t always a reason to compare myself to people in other lanes. They’re faster. They’re slimmer. They’re more graceful, every one of them. It’s fine.

Sometimes all that matters is that I’m with a couple lane buddies and we’re having fun together, doing our best, and trying hard not to drown.

This post is part of a 31-day series called “Grace in Failure.” Other posts from the series can be found here.