Quitting to Get Ahead

Confession: I think that I’m still in love with a sport that didn’t love me back.

It’s been a good three years or so since the last time that I slung a damp swimsuit and towel around the edge of my washing machine to dry. Three years since I pulled myself up out of the pool after a race, three years since I licked my goggles and pressed them to my face before hopping in for warmup or spent two hours of my afternoon in a four-mile swim or so, and about three years since I’ve been able to really call myself a swimmer, whether that was just the high-school version or a competitive edition, engaged in dozens of hours per week in a pool with my YMCA team.

Look at my internet history (well, don’t), and you’ll find swim websites scattered across my closed tabs and most visited pages. Olympic year or not, I can tell you a smattering of the top swimmers in the country, ranging from veterans who have been through three Olympic Games (Nathan Adrian, I love you!) and college standouts to up-and-coming teenagers. I’ve watched livestreams of swim conference championships, have a fan favorite between Cal and Stanford — two of the top women’s swim teams in the country — and keep up with major swim meets, races, and records as regularly as possible. I try to keep up with the races, state bracket, and records of my high school’s team, despite having watched the group of girls who were freshmen when I was a senior just finish up their last season (as three-time defending state champions, no less). I like to stay in the loop.

I’m pretty much still heavily invested in and in love with a sport that doesn’t feel the same way about me.

I started swimming as a kid, plunked in children’s swim lessons at the YMCA for the main reason that my parents had never learned how to swim, so they naturally wanted my sister and me to gain some aquatic abilities, if not for sheer pragmatism. At age eight, my mom dragged me to swim team tryouts, and after making the cut for the Y team (do eight-year-old kids really get cut, though?), my competitive swim career began.

Make no mistake: I was never a natural talent.

I remember races upon races with months of disqualifications, or DQs, for illegally scissor kicking during breaststroke. I was one of two kids in my entire age group on the team who couldn’t complete a flip turn, with the other swimmer (out of 30 or 35 eight-and-unders who couldn’t) being age six. I don’t know if it my late start to the skill game was from simply never having been taught or having refined said skills in swim lessons or if this were a sign of my future.

You know how it goes: Hard work pays off. Well, through years of practices, eventually learning how to complete a flip turn and to successfully, though not particularly quickly, swim breaststroke, a good few years of private lessons on the side, and probably sheer luck, I had a few great seasons as a swimmer. At age twelve, I won the High Point Award for a state YMCA championship meet, in which I earned the most points from top finishes in events of all 11-12-year-old girls at that state-wide meet. For the first time, I qualified for the state championship meet in two butterfly events, having swam fast enough times to get there.

It kind of went downhill from there.

For whatever the reasons that my parents had once encouraged my sister and me to join the swim team — fitness, athleticism, friendships, potential college application bolstering — at age eight, those same reasons were insufficient as soon I hit high school.

Facing a stagnating swim career, in which my parents and I knew that whatever the outcomes of my time and swims, I would never become a collegiate swimmer (more specifically, not at the schools that we considered good, where our eyes were otherwise set on the prize in terms of the U.S. News & World Report rankings).

I was not one of the kids on my YMCA team headed to Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, or Brown to swim for their Division I programs. I was, at best, an average swimmer, and with an increasingly heavy courseload of honors and AP classes at school, the decision was heartbreakingly clear: Time to hang up the goggles and quit.

I resent using the word “quit,” because I think that reflects a sentiment of being unwilling to give maximum effort. Quitting means that you stopped because you were too lazy and that you refused to continue trying because your heart wasn’t set on anything. I don’t think that’s my case. I quit swimming although I still loved the sport — still love it, apparently! — and if I hadn’t had to choose between giving myself an extra 15 hours per week to study and sleep rather than stare at the black line of a chlorine-filled box, I wouldn’t have chosen.

I did, obviously. I stopped swimming, but I haven’t quit loving the sport. I quit swimming to get ahead, or perhaps solely to balance myself out and even the playing field with every other academically similar peer of mine who had long given up a competitive, time-consuming sport. I’m still in love with something that didn’t love me back, something that didn’t give me the results or time or success that I hope for it, but academically instead of athletically, that push was what I needed to survive, thrive, and achieve.

I quit to get where I am today.