How I’m using swimming as a training ground for redemption
Cause you could have it with the sweat from your neck
And a self placed bet in the mirror
Stand tall my nigga your dreams on your shoulders
A hundred million lashes but you know they couldn't hold us
– from #KingButch by Butcher Brown
I was never an athlete.
My failures in sports are quite well-known and are a bit of a running joke in my family. Though I frankly never found it very funny, there is admittedly a bit (a lot) of truth to it.
I tried dance, tennis, basketball, soccer, swimming, track, and cheerleading and didn't stick with any of them. And family teasing aside, self-awareness is key; I am quite literally the last person you'd want on your team, I assure you.
I’d beg my coaches to take me out the game. Once, a teammate threw a basketball in my direction during a real-life game and I, in front of my entire family and team, closed my eyes in terror and shoved it away without much care as to who I had shoved it to. Team sports were (and are) too noisy for me; there are too many people moving around and it’s just generally far too stressful for me to watch or play with much joy. (Note: there are some exceptions; volleyball is really fun and dramatic to watch!)
Thankfully, in my youth, I knew what I loved to do, and I was blessed to be in an environment in which I could pursue it fully, with the untampered ability to focus and develop. I was never pressured; I was left to my own devices in a school quite literally designed for and known for excellence in academics and arts.
Yet doing what you love and honing your craft does not protect you from the messages of the world that tell you it is not enough. I was a dark skin chubby little Black girl with glasses. No matter how much I read, no matter how many friends I had, no matter how well-mannered and funny I was, and no matter how well I performed in school, the messages, though certainly not as deafening as they could've been, were loud and clear to me: I wasn't enough.
I needed to do more, be smaller, look different. So, I signed up for a gym membership at 17, beginning a seven-year experiment in figuring out how to morph my body into images never meant for me to embody in the first place.
Seven years later, I sat in tears on my best friend's balcony looking at a color-coded graph I made in Google Sheets. The line graph painted a glaringly stagnant picture of my progress using six months of measurements taken while I was working with a personal trainer.
The data had spoken: all the work, money, and time I had invested still wasn’t enough.
The lines’ small movements up and down cast a shadow over the great exhibits of strength I had shown in the same six-month span. The incredible amount of endurance I had developed and the expansion of my physical capabilities suddenly meant nothing. All I could see was that I wasn't getting any smaller and therefore, I was a failure. I was the problem.
Strength training, I concluded, was not for me. After over a year of training, I broke up with my trainer in defeat.
As I wandered the Kansai region of Japan for my 25th birthday trip one evening, I found myself on the top floor of a bookstore in Shinsaibashi, Osaka. I fumbled through the generous array of English books and eventually landed on Stronger by Poorna Bell, a journalist and power-lifter in the UK. I spent the rest of the trip and the entire flight home reading it incessantly and, most importantly, actively considering what I could do with the material I was reading. I won’t spoil the book, but it deeply inspired me to rethink the way I see myself and my body and my relationship to exercise.
As a result, my goal is no longer to be smaller. It is, for the long term, to have all the strength I need to care for myself and those around me for as long as humanly possible. For the medium term, to complete a sprint triathlon. And for the short term? I’m going to learn how to swim.
I'm going to start swimming so that I can kayak more confidently, knowing that in the unlikely chance I'm ejected from my kayak without a life vest, the Chattahoochee River (or whichever body of water I'm visiting) will not overtake me.
I'm going to start swimming because swimming is a skill and learning new skills aids in neuroplasticity.
I'm going to start swimming because cardio is important for good heart health and swimming builds lung capacity. I want to live long and the stronger I can make my heart and lungs, the better off I'll be when I'm 87 climbing the Andes with my grandchildren on their spring break trip or just walking my dog on my future #girlwalks.
I'm going to start swimming because I'm never going to the Mediterranean Sea without getting in the water again. I don't want to just see the crystal clear bodies of water, I want to feel it on my skin.
I’m going to start swimming because a lot of the messaging and imagery around it is not centered on thinness. It’s a sport that feels more centered on overall wellbeing and ability than other activities I’ve tried.
I’m going to start swimming because a lot of folks said I couldn’t. All my life people have been counting me out, speaking athletic incompetence onto me, and actively discouraging me from building my own relationship with sport. I’m using swimming as an opportunity to redefine what strength means to me, learn a useful life survival skill, and prove to myself and anyone watching what I am capable of.
I'm also learning to swim because I want to do my first triathlon this August. I’m so excited to really approach fitness not from the perspective of how much weight can I lose, but from the perspective of how fast or how far can I bike, run, and swim? I can focus on what I can accomplish with this body, not necessarily about what my body looks like compared to anybody else’s or what the scale has to say about it. Perhaps my body will change as I continue to pursue being a triathlete and training as a triathlete, but I will welcome those changes with open arms and respect them and honor them. I will not shame or hyperfocus on what is changing and how it's changing, but instead I will consider how I am changing for the better. I'm gaining more than one life skill through this endeavor. That is a change I'm really looking forward to.
Thalia, a freshly-turned 25-year-old, is growing up, reading books, and touching grass. Wish her luck!
