Persistence

In the beginning; what a great start to a good book. In the beginning all I knew about swimming I learned from the local neighborhood recreation swim league team. The same goes for Jean. Our family had no history in competitive swimming whatsoever. There were some equivalencies between distance running and distance swimming, but the particulars of swimming and swim meets were completely foreign to what we knew.

It turned out that swim meets have time standards, and if you haven’t done the qualifying time standard in an officially sanctioned meet, you cannot swim in the meet. There were time standards for B, BB, A, AA, AAA, AAAA, and top-16 for each two year age group and gender from 10 & under up to 17-18! There were State Age Group meet times, Regional Meet times, Junior National Meet times, Senior National Meet times, NCAA Meet times, and Olympic trial times. John started out in some dismal swim meets with B and double B times, or no time at all.

Swimmers are “seeded” in meets according to their previous qualifying times. In a large swim meet there might be 8 heats of the 11-12 year old boy’s 100 yard butterfly beginning with the slowest kids and working up to the fastest. There is a thing called “circle seeding” that defies description. As I said in an earlier post, imagine this for each two year age group, each gender, each stroke, and each distance. It’s an unbygodbelievable number of heats.

In the early “age group” years John would start out the season swimming in the slower heats and by the end of the season would be moving into the faster heats. About the time he would reach the fastest heats, he would have a birthday moving him into the next age group and then he would be back down the pecking order swimming in the slower heats against older kids. There was always someone better to swim against. Every time he got good enough to be one of the best at a swim meet, he’d get bumped up to bigger and tougher swim meets, or to an older age group.

There were a host of swimmers much better than John over the years. That host included pretty much everybody in the early years. Early on I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if someday John could swim as fast as Bubba?” And then that next year when he was able to swim with Bubba I said to myself, “That’s cool, but he’ll never be as good as Brandon!” The year after that, when he was swimming in the heats with Brandon, I thought, “Everyone has limits. He may be able to swim with Brandon, but Dan is surely out of John’s league.” And so it went, year after year. John steadily improved.

Throughout his career John qualified for County, State, Regionals, Junior Nationals, Senior Nationals, NCAA Division I Nationals, and the Olympic Trials twice. He set 2 individual records for his high school and was part of 2 relay records for his high school, set 2 high school county records, set state age group records 4 times, was a 9-time high school all-American, was the #1 high school scholastic all-American in 2003, set a national age group record, set the high school state record for the 500 freestyle in 2003, was Atlantic Coast Conference Champion in the 1650 freestyle for the University of Virginia in 2006, was an 8-time NCAA All-American, one of which was sixth in the nation in the 1650. Not too shabby for a kid who nearly drowned in the public pool as a munchkin.

The funny thing was I never really noticed what John had accomplished overall until I compiled the list in the previous paragraph. Every time we dropped him off at the pool for a swim meet the only thing we ever said was “Have fun!” And when we were driving home from a swim meet our primary question would be “Did you have fun?” It was up to John to decide whether he did well or not, and whether he was happy with his times and places in the races.

He wasn’t a natural, but he did love swimming. He wasn’t some sort of all-star swimming phenom, but he did eventually get really good at it. The success he had was the result of gradual consistent improvement. He worked hard every day, day after day, from 1995 to 2008.

Persistence