Write Stuff Cafe

All through high school, I spent most of my weekends at swim meets. Back then, in the early 90’s, in Virginia Beach, they had not yet created high school teams so I swam for a club team. I trained before school many mornings and after school every day. I was a good swimmer, in one of the top training groups, but I was one of those swimmers who had to work at it. Unlike my brother, who could pick up any sport and just naturally be good at it. I put in the work in the training pool so that I could hopefully drop time and swim fast at meets.

Swim meets lasted usually three days, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There were so many different individual events and relays as well. Looking back, it seemed like once you stepped into the facility where the meet was, you were in your own special time zone, like stepping into a Vegas casino, only without the ping ping of the slot machines, the faint smell of cigarette smoke or the scantily clad cocktail waitresses. In a swim meet you had the beep of the starter, the permanent smell of chlorine, and hundreds of swimmers squeezed into paper suits under their parkas. Not sure what was going on in the outside world because we were shut out from the outside world, focused only on swimming or waiting to swim.

In any given event, there could be ten, fifteen, twenty heats. Sometimes I would swim an event that wasn’t my best, like 200 IM. I might be in heat seven, lane eight. Fastest swimmers on the inside lanes, slowest swimmers in each heat on the outside lanes. Pyramid seeding. I would be behind the block while heat six was in the water, watching those swimmers, checking my cap for the hundredth time, dinking with my goggles to make sure they were just right in my eye sockets. And then it was my time, and suddenly I would be in the water swimming eight lengths, two of each stroke. And then I would be done, sometimes having a good swim where I dropped five seconds from my previous swim, sometimes having a bad swim where I added a second. And I would be out of the pool drying off and the next heat would be in the water.

There were other times where I was in the final heat, the fastest heat, the best swimmers. Two hundred butterfly was my event, the one I trained the most for. It helped that not many people could successfully complete eight laps of butterfly. In championship meets, like the East Coast Zones meet that I qualified for as a sophomore in high school, you would swim your event in the morning, qualify for finals, and have to come back and swim it again at night. Sixteen laps of butterfly is a lot. I placed second that year.

I haven’t thought too much about all of my time at swim meets until recently. Interning with Forge Magazine and reading submission after submission, I can’t help but feel like so many of these writers are in their different heats for their events, non fiction, micro-fiction, fiction. Different from me as a swimmer, they don’t get to see their competition in the lane next to them. But I do. I have been grouping the readings. I will read all of the over 3,000 words fiction pieces at the same time. Many of them are in heat seven, with no chance of making it to that final heat, the publication heat. At least not at this meet, the Forge Magazine meet. Maybe with another lit mag, another time, their writing will end up in the final heat.

I have been surprised at all of the very different kinds of writing that I have read, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. When I was a swimmer, there were hundreds of other swimmers, just like me, trying to get to that final heat. Perfecting our strokes, pushing ourselves to get better. Now, I see there are hundreds of writers, just like me, trying to get published. Perfecting their technique, playing with language. Hoping to be a stand out in the pool.