Fun and Games

I have recently taken a swimming class that left me high and dry, dear reader. In an attempt to leave the house more and do something besides sit hunched over at my desk doing a fair impression of a shrimp, I signed up for an adult swimming class at my local pool. This is the sort of class where you ostensibly learn the finer points of back crawl and whip kick, where you practice breathing patterns and build up your stamina for swimming lengths. The other folks in my lessons were all Francophone, and the vast majority were either injured runners looking to stay fit without causing further damage, or triathletes. These are a special type of person who likes three sports (running, cycling, swimming) so much that they cannot possibly choose between them, so they do all three and nearly simultaneously. This breed of vigorous Quebecois athlete is very common in my experience, and their love for sport and competition seems equal only to their love of Lycra. I was the only one there for fun.

So imagine my dismay at the end of every lesson, when there were about fifteen minutes left, that our instructor would cheerfully announce a race - a relay, individual races, round robins, you name it. Who can front crawl fastest? Who can tread water the longest? Apparently, these questions were pressing and demanded answers. The sad and sorry truth is that I had at least part of the answer: I could guarantee that under no circumstances would the answer be ‘me.’ I knew before I ever got in the water that I would be the slowest, the most awkward, the least comfortable in the pool, and I had made a tenuous sort of peace with that. Someone has to be last - why not me? I tried to be a good sport about these races, putting on a rueful smile and doing my level best, trying to ignore the thought that all of these competitive, Spandex-wrapped folks surely already had enough opportunity to beat each other at sport and then swagger about with their medals, drinking protein shakes and squirting packets of goo into their mouths. But a little voice that grew increasingly louder with every lesson had its own question: why are we doing this?

The answers to that are, in my opinion, unsatisfactory. ‘Because competition is fun!’ I hear you say. Well, fun is subjective. Swimming breathlessly against someone who is beating the pants off me, easily, over and over and over is not my idea of fun - nowhere near it. “Competition pushes you to do better!’ others might chime in. Again, I think this assertion needs deeper consideration. I actually do not find that pressure helps me do well - I tend to feel best about my output when I am left well enough alone to sort myself out. Other people screaming “Lache pas!” (Don’t give up) at me from the other side of the pool does not inspire me to greatness - it induces violent rage.

Does all of this stem from childhood sports trauma, the terror of gym class? I’m sure that it does. I have such clear memories of being picked last for things, of knowing, deeply and profoundly, that I was never an asset to any sports team. I got to a point where I would wearily offer to sit out the game to give my classmates an out from the socially awkward moment of having to pick me as a partner, making it easier for everyone. We all know how this is going to end, was my argument. Let’s not delay the inevitable with pretence. I also remember thinking that there was a strange imbalance in the pool of my childhood swimming lessons or the gymnasium of mysense of school, which I could not make . When I did exceptionally well at a spelling test or a book report, the teacher would slide those graded papers back to me overturned, and we were strictly warned not to share our grades, for fear of hurting the sensitive feelings of the rather stupid boys (and yes, they always seemed to be boys) who could not figure out how to spell ‘patio’ and refused to do the readings. But there seemed to be absolutely no consideration for my sensitivities during a dodgeball match or a game of soccer baseball - everyone knows that Jennifer is dreadful at literally all team sports, and we routinely remind her of that. What is that for? Does it build character? Does it push me to want to be better at broomball? No, dear reader, it did not. And I confess it remains an ineffective tool for motivation. My fellow adult swimmers and I did not openly discuss our incomes or divorces or emotional intelligence or our latest work performance review at the pool - but at the end of every hour, we were all left in no doubt about who was the worst swimmer in the water - and that was me. I do not have an answer for how to resolve this imbalance - I no longer wish to shame other people for being stupid and lazy as I did as a child (not an attractive tendency, I know), so I have no idea how to level the playing field, har har. If you have an answer to this question, dear reader, you might let me know.

Jennifer