Keep Swimming Anonymous

At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Japanese runner Shizo Kanakuri dropped out midway through the marathon after feeling like he could no longer keep running. He simply took a boat home without telling anyone, and the race officials assumed he had died. Decades later, it was discovered that he was alive and had raised a family in Japan, and the Swedish National Olympic Committee invited him back to finish the race. He accepted and completed the marathon in the recorded time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds.

“You can quit the race, and nothing that bad will happen,” I tell myself, and roll this thought in my mind as if it were a pearl in my hand as I put on my swim cap and prepare for another 6 am practice. It was soon after an early winter’s premier meet in New Jersey 2015 when I competed in the 100-yard freestyle. I had finished the race, touched the wall, and saw on the scoreboard that I had missed the cut-off for a YMCA National time by one-hundredth of a second. For all the benefits of my nine years in swimming, the rhetoric of persistence I had previously stopped at that moment. How could a hundredth of a second be the difference between me feeling like I had everything versus me feeling like...