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Athletics is a subject about which, in that human way, I tend to get a little binary: There was a time when I shunned sport, and a time much later when I embraced it. This narrative has the advantage of being a narrative—giving full explanatory force to the exposure and revelation that turned me to athlete from non-. But in truth, swimming spanned the entirety. I swam, pretty happily, when I was a child and early teen, and a year or two for fun in college. The final mark of becoming an athlete was a return, last year, to swimming. Swimming was always the hint.
This was on my mind yesterday when I swam at Steiner Aquatic Center, near the house where I grew up in Salt Lake City. Steiner is only a couple of decades old—it was built when I was a child and expanded before the 2002 Winter Olympics to include ice rinks. But whereas I once experienced it as the bland epitome of public infrastructure, not ugly exactly but concrete and neutral-toned and blocky and wholly unexceptional, time has changed my perspective. Like so many things in Utah, Steiner is beautiful not mainly because of what it is (though I do now think it’s gorgeous in itself), but where. Its outdoor pool is 50 meters long and lies in a place and in such a way that the sky’s vastness is exaggerated there: The Wasatch Mountains to the east, dominant of the valley’s whole horizon, are barely visible from the swimming lanes, and most of what lies below the downward slope to the west is hidden, too. When you stand in the water you’re on a plane bordered gently on one side by a rise of grass that could be anywhere, and nearly everything else—up and down, left and right—is blue.
I’ve won races (two or three; breaststroke) in that pool. I’ve evacuated it because of lightning in the distance. I’ve taken breaks from indolent summer afternoons to walk over with my $1.25 and get a churro. And—at every age but this one—I’ve labored not to get caught staring at the handsome collegiate lifeguards, ranged out in perimeter on their princely stages.
Yesterday I felt a touch of the numinous there, the early sun sending its electric shock against the overnight desert cool, the splashes of the other swimmers lost to the acoustic infinite above. My outdoor goggles polarized the light and framed everything in neon green, and as I gasped for air at 5,000 feet above sea level I thought about what luck it was that had brought me back to the pool where I once feared this activity—or at least the culture around it, the pressure and spectacle—more than I loved it. So that I could see how fear and love had, by the work of life, been inverted.
In the more remote Uinta Mountains, a day before, I’d persuaded my nephew, Adlai, to try out a kayak by offering to wade alongside him, my hand on the hull, no threat of getting too deep. “You’re just gonna lightly push me in the shallow,” this five-year-old instructed me (in a moment that will live in familial infamy because my sister got it on video), and I thought that this was wise advice when it comes to things we wish to do but haven’t yet done. Lightly, in the shallow. You swim when you’re ready.
Coming Friday: Preparation.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.