(no subject)
this week, or rather what has become last, is always a weird one. we wait for it and countdown to it and in november we are in awe of its possibililty, in february its proximity. what do you mean there is a time when we sleep past six and don't spend five hours of the day at the pool? when is this time when saturdays are of our own design and we are not always so. tired. the last two weeks are spent lusting after indulgences like coffee and cookies and being able to walk up stairs without guilt or slip on ice without having a full body freakout as you catch yourself and think no no no not now not with a week left. and then it comes and then its gone and you land with some kind of thud and whoops-we-plowed-through-14-bottles-of-champagne-with-ease-yesterday fuzziness in monday and its like, oh. oh. so this is it? and this one was of course, the Big It, the rest of our lives, dramatically speaking. this is walking across the bulkhead saturday night flowers in hand as we wave back at a beaming mass of orange while the rest of the team disappears behind cameras and cheers and beneath all that blurred applause someone says something about the class of 2009 and were all shit, its really us. this is stepping up on the blocks at finals for the 500, then the 4 IM, and finally for that godforsaken mile and knowing they will all be the last.
it was sunyacs like no other, thats for damn sure. c.b. dubbs was on hand as an athletic director and constant source of smiles and miraculous shoulder massages, but no longer as a coach. the crazyass blue seventy and several crazyass swimmers, many of them our own, rewrote the record book. somehow, my taper missed the mark, and i arrived in the buff with a nagging ache in my legs that no amount of mental toughness could shake. i dove in for my races and most of my body said no. i swam my way to best times, even if some only tied them, and scored in everything, but with a sinking, painful feeling that this wasn't my time. that for whatever reason i hurt like mid-season and with maybe a little more rest or a little more something, id be flying, and despite the hardest and perhaps best training of my life, it wasn't going to quite come together. that this wasn't the swimmer i could really, really be and that now, i might not ever find out. it hit me like a punch in the stomach each time and i fell apart anew. i lost sight, like i always do, of every other part of me and sobbed into the warm down pool as tiff held my hand, wept into my mom's shoulder when she found me after the mile and let coach (because he will never be brian) watch me sniffle back to life as he (again) put together the mess he's watched this sport make of me for four years. "25 percent," he said, making me look into his eyes. the number of ncaa athletes who begin a sport their freshman year and actually make it through four. he reminded me of all the things i need to be reminded of, and i was fine (again). "i know you, and even if you got out of that pool with whatever time you'd had in your head, you wouldn't have been satisfied" it was my release he said, and like my mom said it gave me "a chance to grieve" the loss of what has been a pretty enormous part of nearly 12 years of my life. i got perspective, got myself together, and soaked up another sunyacs of all of us cheering each night by way of nearly throwing ourselves off our bleachers sweating and becoming a mosh pit as we looked up at the clock and screamed til there was no voice left and swear we'd lost a pound. we hugged tightly and loved and moved and joked and ranted like the family we are. we ate too much and laughed the way only we do and described in detail the daunting task of shoving your ass into a racing suit and danced across the pool deck and wondered what the housekeeping staff would think when they found bloody towels each day because uh, shavings hard when you're out of practice, whoops. i searched the stands for whit, total BPE, and craig yax and found them and the pre-race knot that runs through me loosened and her being there is what ill always remember, the outcome of that swim be damned. i read letters from the coaches and girls that make it all worthwhile, watched my dad get weepy day after day and watched my mom play hostess with the mostest and watched the hawk parents become a (never again to be upstaged by oswego) wave of fierce and wonderful orange. my parents and i couldnt stop being proud of each other, and all of us that last night, as the whole mixed crowd of the hawk fam clustered around pizza and wing boxes and tried to delay our trip back with constant hugging, were in some way unstoppable.
"after everyone had left i just went out there, to the empty stands and just sat , looking down at the pool, and i thought, man, 11 years, we've had some good times here, man." my dad's eyes filled and re-filled and i struggled as always to be present, to share his ability to do this when i tend to lazily wait for nostalgia, unable to process the weight of the moment. i walked towards the front door and while waiting for sam, looked towards the ceiling like i never will in the same way again and for one second it all hit me in that cinematic way that it should, before we squeezed on the bus, sure we'd do this forever. "it hasn't hit us yet" was and still is our go-to answer when asked what it's like to be done. when it will happen i dont know, but i know that when i said i wouldn't be "done" if i didnt swim in college i was right, because "done" feels even harder to grasp than ever. what i won't miss is inextricably tied to what a will in a nutso sport that requires a love made from a kind of hate that thrives on pain and pushing further, harder. the this-is-why-i-do-this feeling of floating on my back during the warm down that follows a 15,000 yard day is nothing without the fuck-my-life feeling of each morning. the nearly existentialist freakouts of my junior year when i wondered what it meant, what i was even DOing slide into the conviction that there is too much undeniable good here to mean nothing. four years. of ALL of that. we did it, i did it. and now ill make the clunky transition into my post-swimming life like i always do, learn to fill up the new, free time and let any lingering regret fade into my happily revisionist memory, weightless as the water.