When I was a kid, my summer was consumed by our club swim team. My brother, David, and I no sooner finished swimming lessons than we raced up to the swim team coach to ask if we could try out for the swim team. We made it.  Everyone did. But we were overjoyed, nonetheless.

We spent every day walking to the pool with our friends at 8:30 a.m. and arriving back home at 12 p.m. for lunch.  How our mothers must have loved that. Swim team practice was two to two-and-a-half hours of swimming laps, mock races, kickboard exercises and more laps. It’s the same today from what I can see at the YMCA. We were tired, and we might have cheated a little on how many laps we actually swam, but it was still a whole lot of laps.

I wonder now, when there was no indication that I’d get any better at this, why I was so consumed by it, each and every summer beginning at age six or seven and continuing until I was 13. Of course, I was part of something larger and when the team won, we all celebrated. But I was never entered into too many events (sometimes throughout the whole swim meet, I’d have one event). Oh, and minor detail here, I never came in first place, rarely took second, had a whole bunch of yellow ribbons for third, and sometimes lost. And yet, faithfully, willingly and even fiercely, I went to practice each and every day with the hope that this would be my break-out week.

At weekly swim meets, we’d cluster in our age groups, eying the older kids with awe, each with our packet of Jell-O (for energy, of course), and we’d lick the wrapper clean, as if pure, flavored sugar could propel us to the finish line while taking precious seconds off the stopwatch.

I even remember praying about it every night. (Please, God, make me a fast, great swimmer.) I wanted so badly to win – to be fast, admired, praised, celebrated. In retrospect and with age comes the knowledge that it was the approval and praise I wanted more than anything. It seemed to me that the coolest kids (and therefore the most well-liked kids) were the best swimmers. And I was always competitive in that department (the popularity contest, not swimming). I even attended something called Bob Matson’s Mechanics in the colder months to try to improve my technique (pretty sure it didn’t work). Undeterred, I returned year after year to my summer club team. Eventually, I found other outlets for my need to succeed, but for all of those early years, I never gave up hope that next year I’d be among the best.

It never happened, though. Yes, I still swim, if you’re wondering. And I’ve been told, recently as a matter of fact, that I have a beautiful stroke and that you can see that I used to compete. And strangely, I still get kind of a glow when someone compliments me on that. I guess we don’t change over the years as much as we think we do.