Swimming Studies E-Book

Leanne Shapton

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 259

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most sight: this is a swimmer's state. When ten-year-old Leanne Shapton joins a swim team, she finds an affinity for its rhythms – and spends years training, making it to the Olympic trials twice. Swimming Studies reflects on her time immersed in a world of rigour and determination, routine and competition. Vivid details of a life spent largely underwater emerge: adolescence in suburban Canada, dawn risings for morning practice, bus rides with teammates, a growing collection of swimsuits, dips in lakes and oceans. When she trades athletic pursuits for artistic ones, the metrics of moving through water endure. In elegant, spare writing, Shapton renders swimming as a mode of experiencing time, movement, and perspective, capable of shaping our lives in every environment. The result is captivating and profound: a modern classic of sport writing and memoir from a singular talent.

Leseprobe

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Praise for SwimmingStudies

“I’m so happy this book exists. SwimmingStudiesexpresses what it’s like to be haunted by the person one used to be, and the search for how that person exists in the present. Leanne Shapton writes with such curiosity, ruefulness, intelligence, and grace. Here we see how the discipline of being an athlete can condition one’s way of making art, and how the patience necessary to make art teaches other types of patience. Like the patience required to be a spouse and to love a person always. This book is a rare treat for anyone who cares about any of these things.”

—Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries

“If there is a more beautifully observed examination of weightlessness, silence, rigor, and delight of what it means to swim, I’ve never read it. Leanne Shapton is one of the most broadly creative and gifted people at work today; a true artist, both visual and verbal. There seems to be nothing she cannot write or paint about: adolescence, Canada, yearning, dawn—even cake, for heaven’s sake!—with a precision both surgical and poetic. The joys of SwimmingStudiesare in being in the care of someone of a prodigious and protean mind. My talent crush is official and deep.”

—David Rakoff, author of Half Empty

“A cool memoir about competitive swimming that might as well be called The Unbearable Lightness of Being…. Shapton, never self-pitying, offers an original, mythical elixir of life in the water.”

—Newsweek

B“[A] thoughtful, exquisitely written book … ostensibly about [Shapton’s] lifelong relationship to the sport, complete with photos of her various bathing suits and meditations on the difference between swimming (i.e., competitive swimming) and bathing (i.e., swimming for fun)…. She even includes some haunting, cobalt blue illustrations of pools she frequents as an adult, as well as a color guide to different swimming smells, such as ‘coach: fresh laundry, windbreaker nylon, Mennen Speed Stick, Magic Marker, and bologna.’ These extra visual elements dazzle, but the specifics of this world and her insightful take on her own far-from-ordinary life are what makes any reader wonder if Shapton’s gold medal might have already been won—in writing.”

—Oprah.com, Book of the Week

“Shapton draws on her experience training for the Olympic trials in a refreshing and thoughtful memoir about swimming as competition and way of life. Her ode to the water is not only philosophical but incredibly moving.”

—EntertainmentWeekly

“The talented illustrator Leanne Shapton, in her pointillistic and quietly profound new memoir, Swimming Studies … writes as confidently as she draws, and memorably conjures swimming’s intense, primordial and isolating pleasures…. Shapton’s prose frequently has the density of poetry…. [She] is so smart and so likable that you will pass her book along to the swimmers in your life.”

—Dwight Garner, The NewYorkTimes

“In this small, lovely book, [Shapton] combines words and images in an exquisitely observed meditation on swimming and memory…. What’s thrilling about this book is its author’s careful Cattention to detail and unlikely beauty. More impressionistic than a traditional memoir, the book nonetheless sketches an arc that brings the author back to competitive swimming, in masters races in the United States.”

—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“A fusion of cool, clear-eyed prose and watercolors, photographs and painted portraits … [and] a curiously arresting study of the transition from a world of rigor and routine to one of reflection and recreation…. The brilliance of SwimmingStudieslies in its delicate exploration of how the identities we’ve carved out for ourselves in the present are both haunted and shaped by the people we used to be.”

—Time Out NewYork

“What makes this book astounding … [is] any dedicated swimmer knows exactly what Shapton means; we sense and control our movements, from the tips of our fingers to the flutter of our feet, breathing very specifically, detecting any shifts in conditions, from the presence of other swimmers to the tug of a current…. Shapton pares down her experiences as a swimmer and grafts the core lessons to other parts of her life, allowing them to bloom in ways that have everything and nothing to do with swimming.”

—Buzz Poole, The Millions

“Painter and illustrator Leanne Shapton relates with poignancy the details of a competitive swimmer’s life … beautifully written, beautifully constructed, and thoughtful.”

—The Huffington Post

“[SwimmingStudies] is brilliant, eccentric and moving—an immersion in a life…. Shapton has a novelist’s instinct for the nostalgic Dcharge of the inconsequential…. Her language is as crisp as the autumn day she describes.”

—Kate Kellaway, The Observer (London)

“Acknowledging the ultimate incomprehensibility of athletic greatness, [Shapton] nonetheless brings us closer to its essence…. If those countless practice laps and those not-quite-Olympian results were what it took to produce Swimming Studies, it was worth it: Shapton has bottled the elusive meaning of having tried and failed at a sport better than any book I’ve read since Pat Jordan’s classic AFalseSpring. Read SwimmingStudiesand enjoy the incomprehensible greatness of the world’s best all the more.”

—Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette

“[Shapton’s] eye for detail [is] amazingly shrewd…. Gaspingly beautiful in its insight, proving her project actually has very little to do with swimming … SwimmingStudiesis an intimate and beautiful meditation on human fallibility and the embarrassing, often unstated anxiety of success.”

—Stacey May Fowles, National Post (Toronto)

“In her illustrated memoir, Shapton, a writer, artist, and former contender for the Canadian Olympic team, grapples with the habits she learned as a teen-age competitive swimmer … and her honed attention to detail gives the reader the sensation of watching a meticulous mind watching itself, down to the hundredth of a second.”

—The New Yorker

“It looks like Shapton can succeed at whatever she puts her mind to; swimming is where that started…. As few people can, EShapton draws a connection between making art and being an athlete, focusing on the unending effort it takes to do well…. She is, no doubt, a creative powerhouse, one who puts words and pictures together with a quiet force that comes only from solid, dedicated practice.”

—Carolyn Kellogg, Los AngelesTimes

“I was a competitive swimmer, and I have never read anything that captured the sport so well. Shapton knows just the details to include…. Her sparse, satisfying prose is your guide, and you’re glad to get to swim beside her.”

—Carolyn Kormann, The New Yorker

“Through immaculate observation and evocative recollection, Leanne Shapton’s autobiographical SwimmingStudiesachieves the seemingly impossible. In a series of sharp snapshots of life as a competitive swimmer and beyond, she has managed to find ‘the language of belonging,’ giving a voice to silent hours spent submerged in water…. Beautifully written and gorgeous to look at, too…. Ultimately, Swimming Studies is about more than swimming. It’s about how the discipline of competitive sport teaches routine, perseverance and good habits. It’s about how the diligence of athletic practice can translate into art, communication and even love.”

—Nicola Joyce, TheWashingtonPost F

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Swimming Studies

LEANNE SHAPTON

With a foreword by Rita Bullwinkel

DAUNT BOOKS

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To Mom, Dad, and Derek

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Contents

Title PageDedicationForeword: Shaving Spines by Rita BullwinkelWaterQuittingByronSwimming StudiesFinalsDoughnutsSweatshirtsLaundryFourteen OdorsCrown AssetsOther SwimmersStudebakersEtobicokeDerekNight KitchenTraining CampSizeSt. BartsPiscine OlympiqueCoachesPracticeMomTitanicGogglesPiña ColadaJawsValsBathingSwimming PoolsSecond SwimAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorAlso by Leanne ShaptonCopyrightviii

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Shaving Spines

a foreword

Before I was born there was a drowning—a would-be cousin, a toddler. It was a death from which no one in my family ever recovered.

Because of the drowning, my grandfather paid for my sister and me to have weekly private swim lessons even before we could walk. We excelled at swimming, were told we could become champions, and then did.

Our lives, for a period of time, were, like Leanne Shapton’s, completely defined by the pool. In SwimmingStudies,the objects, images and memories of Shapton’s swimming past are displayed as an accumulation of evidence. Photographs of her swimsuits, which range from chic bikinis, to vintage one pieces, to technical, high-necked Speedo Fastskins, are rendered, in black and white, with the aesthetic of archeological artifacts or murder weapons—numbered alongside explanatory text that consistently includes geographical locations and numeric dates and times.x

In one of the many painting series in this book, Shapton depicts her memories of swimming with watercolors of blurred figures resisting being overtaken by the bleeding blue of water. These paintings point towards the strange, and slightly alien nature of swimming. We are land animals. We are not amphibious. If we stay in water long enough it will kill us. The impulse for a human to live in water for six hours a day, to spend so much of one’s life inside an inherently hostile medium, is odd.

My sister had a greater natural aptitude than me for swimming, but, by our teenage years, had wearied of the monotony, which Shapton describes with such acute accuracy, of swimming in a pool, and decamped to surfing, in which she also became a champion. My sister still surfs most days. If you surf Beacon’s Beach (a world-famous break in San Diego) you will see my sister paddling out with her powerful shoulders, an impeccable, classically trained swimmer’s form. Swimming still pervades my sister’s life in a way that it no longer does mine, which is why I think I, like Shapton, am deeply puzzled by my past self who swam.

This book has Easter eggs aplenty for people like me who lived a great deal of life in the water, but it also has surprises, radiant moments of recognition and clarity, for anyone who has ever had a self that they have left behind. SwimmingStudies exemplifies the narrative paradox of the specific feeling universal. While this book is certainly about swimming, I think it is xialso a book about fashion, class, class mobility, art-making, motherhood, what it means to be a child, what it means to be an artist, what it means to have loved many people, and what it means to have a life where you’ve, like the greatest athletes, “[died] twice.”

When Shapton was twelve, one of her coaches remarked that she, “had a ‘feel’ for the water.” She knew exactly what he meant and is deeply aware that she still possesses the power. She has, “a knowledge of watery space, being able to sense exactly where [her] body is and what it’s affecting, an animal empathy for contact with an element—the springing shudder a cat makes when you touch its back.”

Because of my own background as a swimmer (and much more successfully as a water polo player), the seduction of this element is both relatable and obvious—who wouldn’t want this superpower?—but it is no less confounding. Shapton’s desire to swim, to become a swimming champion, seems to me obliquely but clearly related to the reason why, in some religions, you are discouraged from depicting faces. She states clearly, and in many different ways, that she was never interested in triumphing over one of her competitors. Her antagonist in a race, if one could even define it that way, was never another girl, but time itself. “Swimmers’ goals are temporal and their efforts interior rather than adversarial or gladiatorial,” she writes. “When I swam I saw familiar faces in my heats, but I xiiknew them by their times—in descending tenths and hundredths of a second—as much as by their names.”

Later, Shapton quotes Glenn Gould explaining his love of the recording studio and describing it as, “an environment where the magnetic compulsion of time is suspended—well, warped at the very least. It’s a vacuum, in a sense, a place where one can properly feel that the most horrendously conflicting force of nature—the inexorable linearity of time—has been, to a remarkable extent, circumvented.”

In one of my favorite passages in the book, one that will live inside me until I die, Shapton recounts her morning pre-swim-practice ritual of warming up her breakfast in the microwave during which she would set the cook timer to one minute and eleven seconds—her aspirational time for the 100-meter breaststroke. In this ritual, Shapton would put the food in the microwave, set the timer, and then close her eyes at the exact same moment that she pressed START. In the following one minute and eleven seconds, inside the sound bath of the cooking-whir of the microwave, Shapton would envision every part of the ideal race that would bring her to the wall in under one minute and eleven seconds. She would control her breathing in the morning darkness of the kitchen so that she was only breathing in when her imagined self wasn’t underwater. She was training in the kitchen, inside the microwave moments, not to visualize a victory, but to bend time itself, to learn how xiiito inhabit it and control it—to sense its passing at the most miniscule levels so that one might be able to stop it, fold it back, and force it to bend to one’s will. Through Shapton we come to understand that the passing of time, like water flowing over hands, can be felt if only you can learn how to feel it. The goal of this exercise was always, for Shapton, eyes still closed, to hit the STOP button on the microwave at the exact moment that its beep signaled that one minute eleven seconds, her winning time, had elapsed.

At the height of her swimming powers, Shapton was ranked 8th in Canada in the 100-meter breaststroke. She writes that she, “wasn’t the best; [she] was relatively fast … [she] was pretty good,” which reveals itself over the course of the book to be such a hyperbolic understatement that one wonders how such a modest posture could possibly be maintained. I read it as the posture not of defeat, but of bafflement: who was the Leanne Shapton of the past and how did she become the almost-best in the world at something? How does one understand being almost-best at anything? Life at large, in all its mess, is never so clear, so understandable, as to gift one the clarity of a ranking. In this book, Shapton remembers the period of time in which she inhabited a national rank, and was identified by the moments, down to the hundredths of a second, with which she could swim one hundred meters using breaststroke in a race. SwimmingStudies is her memoir of that xivpast nationally ranked self, and of the many layers of selfhood that are deposited on the psyche as we move through time and space more generally. Like an archeologist, Shapton excavates the bizarre, occasionally disorienting, act of looking at one’s reflection backwards. Her excavations are equal parts tactile and enchanting. This book includes a great deal of the specifics—the minutiae of goggle-design variables, pool architecture, photographs of swim apparel, photographs of her dad’s cars, portraits of past competitors, paintings of smells—while also detailing the swimming world of Shapton’s youth in broader strokes. This book does not offer explanatory declarations but rather, meditations. These meditations—these SwimmingStudies—are total catnip for anyone who has ever had a close relationship to swimming, but they’re also riveting for anyone who has ever had the impulse to look backwards, to question the boundaries, integrations and disconnections, between how one was in the past and how one is inside the roving period of time known as today.

Even though Shapton identifies time, not the opponent, as a swimmer’s true competitor, she refutes the idea that she was ever pursuing triumph over anything. She cites fictional athletes whose narratives similarly side-step a desire for conquest: “Characters like John Cheever’s swimmer Neddy Merrill, Don DeLillo’s blocker Gary Harkness, and David Foster Wallace’s tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza illuminate a wider, more xvcomplicated swath of culture by not winning. Their swims, games, matches aren’t redemptive. Their trajectories don’t set up victory.” It is the desire for the binary of the win and the loss that Shapton accuses of banality. Anyone who has been gripped by an obsession knows that inhabiting the obsession is what is addictive. If you win or you lose then the race is over. You are no longer inside of it. Being inside the obsession, the act of swimming, is what SwimmingStudiesimbues with importance.

Another one of the (many) miraculous things this book does is posit a theory of the connection between art-making and athletics—a connection that seems, by the sheer number of writers (and editors) I know who obsessively exercise, anecdotally true, but is not often discussed, and never discussed as elegantly and brilliantly as Shapton puts it: “Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins, they require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred.” Shapton’s reach for the divine here, in her sports-art theory, is so bold, and, in my lived experience, true. To make art, you have to build your own church and live inside it. To endure the physical and psychological stress of training to become, as Shapton did, an Olympian, you have to build a church and live inside it, too. They are separate buildings, but if you’ve built a church before, you’re probably pretty good at building churches. Shapton points us here to the truest, most intense and violent reality of xviworld building: all you need to do to build a world is live in it, and it is the act of living in it that makes it real.

Perhaps my sister, the surfer, remodeled her church, instead of abandoning it, and that is why my sister does not carry these feelings of estrangement. I do think SwimmingStudiesis a book about estrangement—and reacquaintance. In the final acts of the book, Shapton questions if she might have a renewed relationship to swimming if she reframes her present-day swimming as bathing. In the present of the book’s telling, Shapton travels internationally to near countless pools in places such as Morocco, Berlin, Lima and Switzerland, with the energy of a chase. The pools Shapton swims in as an adult accumulate like letters sent to an old lover. Their sheer volume is astonishing. These casual swims of the present read like unanswered phone calls to the rigorous, bone-tiring swims of Shapton’s past. The connection between the two is obvious, but not convincing. Encountering long-ago lovers can be similarly beguiling.

The penultimate section of the book, “Swimming Pools”, furnishes some of the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen: seventy-one paintings of seventy-one pools, each painted in rich watercolor, and depicting the shape of a given pool’s most base element—the water contained within it. The absence of everything in these images besides water is nothing short of astounding. Looking at these pool paintings, my mind is brought xviiimmediately to the minimalist Tantric paintings of Rajasthan, India in which Shiva, the god of destruction and transformation, is depicted by an unadorned oval. Tantric paintings, and Shapton’s pool paintings, are both interested in encountering the world through its most base, and therefore most secret, elements. Tantric paintings’ interest in the atom—the smallest, always vibrating, particle in existence—is shockingly similar to Shapton’s empathic interest in the hundredths of a second. How small is the smallest increment of time? Shapton asks. Shapton recalls a game she played with her teammates in which they competed to see how small of an increment of time could, on a given racing stopwatch, be captured. Shapton was able to capture the smallest. With her thumb on the STOP button, the decimal numbers reached the furthest past zero—fractions of a fraction of a second. The magnificence of her pool paintings are, for me, related to this divine smallness. The pool paintings are immediately recognizable as pools to me, yet also make me see a pool as I have never before seen it.

In SwimmingStudies, visual reality, as well as time, is so closely observed, so sharply chronicled, so acutely noticed, that one is immediately seduced into the book’s borders and vistas. Shapton’s singular faculty of sight, and abject refusal to be confined to a single medium, leave her peerless.

I remember the first time I encountered her work. It was 2014. I was twenty-six. I was at Square Books in Oxford, xviiiMississippi. I picked up a display copy of ImportantArtifactsandPersonalPropertyFromtheCollectionofLenoreDoolanandHaroldMorris,IncludingBooks,StreetFashionandJewelry.I read the first fifty pages in the store, then pursued a bookseller and asked, in shock and awe, “who made this?” I read everything Shapton had published up to that point, including SwimmingStudies, shortly thereafter. She remains wholly singular.

My own past as a swimmer, and how my sister and I came to swimming in the wake of a drowning, is perhaps ill placed in this text: a foreword, which is essentially a love letter, to this book that I adore. By including the outlines of the context of my own relationship to the sport I do not mean to equivocate my and Shapton’s experience. I could specify the differences. I could specify the difference in rankings. I could even specify the difference in times, down to the hundredths of a second. But the differences in our lived experiences are perhaps less interesting than the miraculous nature of seeing myself in this book, and the forgotten memories that it brought back to me.

One of the most powerful things that a book, or any work of art, can do is bring forth a dormant memory. This only happens when a work is so potent, so emotionally soaked and radiant, that one’s mind reaches for other times it remembers having the feeling it is currently having while reading.

In SwimmingStudies, Shapton describes a very specific physical act, commonplace among competitive swimmers, xixthat is so bizarre and intimate, even thinking about it makes me stop breathing. She describes, in careful, bodily detail, the act of shaving. The benefits of growing out one’s body hair and then shaving one’s entire body hours before a race are well documented, and required, in the world of competitive swimming. The point is not just to free oneself of the water “drag” of hair, but, through exposing a raw, fresh layer of skin, to make the epidermis slick. It’s very difficult to shave the back of one’s neck, impossible to shave one’s own spine. You need a friend, a teammate, to shave the parts of yourself that, with a blade, you cannot reach. Before a championship meet, a girl named “Mary K. [scraped Shapton’s] shoulder blades and spine.” I can feel myself under the blade in this passage, shaved by my own Mary K., either a Kaitlyn or a Kelly, topless and face-down on a hotel-duvet-covered mattress in a four-to-a-room, two-queen-bed DoubleTree, the nick of the blade as it hits a stray vertebrae, the laughter of all the girls, so many mostly nude girls, giggling, shaving every part of their bodies with shaving cream, hotel ice buckets filled with water used to clean the razors like a painter might clean brushes. When the razor became gunk-filled we would stick it in the bucket and swirl it around, freeing it of its mess, so that the surface of the bucket water was a floating archipelago of hair. Funny, that I remember being shaved, but not shaving someone. I know I must have shaved dozens of girls’ spines, but now I can’t xxremember them. I am sure that it’s because, in SwimmingStudies, Shapton writes only about being under the blade, but not wielding it. I know that if she had written about wielding a blade, I would remember it.

Rita Bullwinkel, 2025

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Swimming Studies

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Water

Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without. Trying to define what swimming means to me is like looking at a shell sitting in a few feet of clear, still water. There it is, in sharp focus, but once I reach for it, breaking the surface, the ripples refract the shell. It becomes five shells, twenty-five shells, some smaller, some larger, and I blindly feel for what I saw perfectly before trying to grasp it.2

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Quitting

Say I’m swimming with people, in the ocean, a pool, or a lake, and one of them knows about my history as a swimmer, and remarks to the others, “Leanne’s an Olympic swimmer.” I’ll protest: “No, no, I only went as far as the Olympic trials—I didn’t go to the Olympics.” But the boast bobs up like a balloon, bright and curious to some, wistful and exposed to me.

When pressed, it is usually enough to say I went to the 1988 and 1992 Canadian Olympic trials. That nationally, I was ranked eighth once, briefly. I explain that to go to the Olympics you have to finish first or second at the trials. This is where the conversations end. After paddling around we wade into the shallows or hoist ourselves up onto the boat or the dock, and the conversation turns toward food, or gossip.4

I don’t have vivid memories of the Olympic trials, or of winning medals; I barely remember quitting the first time, in 1989, or how I told Mitch, my coach. It would have probably been at an evening practice. On the deck, after, when the other swimmers had gone to change. I would have been standing there in my suit with my duffel bag and towel. He would have said something like “What’s up?” And then I would have said it. Said my family was moving to the countryside, said I did not want to live with another family in order to train—so, I said, I had decided to quit.

I might have done it while icing my knees. Freestylers, backstrokers, and butterflyers usually have shoulder problems, but most breaststrokers have knee problems, advised to ice regularly and take eight aspirin a day. After workouts and races, I would sit in the bleachers with a styrofoam cup of frozen water, rolling the flat ice against the insides of my knees until they turned bright pink and lost all feeling. I’d peel the cup back from the edges so it wouldn’t squeak against the numb skin. The ice would become slick, contouring as it melted.

But I don’t remember talking to him. I do remember talking to Dawn, the assistant coach, the next morning. Mitch wasn’t on deck. We sat in two plastic folding chairs by the side of the pool, watching the team practice. Dawn told me Mitch 5was angry. She asked me what I was going to do. I think I said take up piano and study art, knowing she wouldn’t get it. Knowing maybe even I didn’t get it. I remember looking out at the swimmers in the lanes, heading into the hard main set, and thinking: I’ve crossed the line. I don’t have to do that anymore. I remember sitting there and feeling relieved.

Mitch once told me: “You’re going to be great.” Then Dawn told me: “Mitch doesn’t want to talk to you.”

When you’re a swimmer, coaches stand above you, over you. You look up to them, are vulnerable, naked and wet in front of them. Coaches see you weak, they weaken you, they have your trust, you do what they say. The relationship is guardian, father, mother, boss, mentor, jailer, doctor, shrink, and teacher. My heart broke.

My grandfather was a bomber pilot in the Second World War. Though he lived into his late eighties, he’s frozen in my mind as the young man in a photo, wearing a flight suit and goggles, grinning next to a B-25 Mitchell. The image that comes to mind when I think of my mother is a snapshot of her, taken around 1983, sitting on her bed dressed in work clothes: silk shirt, trousers, long necklace, smiling. If I think of my dad, he’s in our dining room, clapping and singing along to “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers. The default image I have of myself 6is a photo: me, ten, standing next to the ladder at Cawthra Park pool in a blue bathing suit, knees clenched, trying to catch my breath.

I’ve defined myself, privately and abstractly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practiced five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn’t the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn’t the best; I was pretty good.

I liked how hard swimming at that level was—that I could do something difficult and unusual. Liked knowing my discipline would be recognized, respected, that I might not be able to say the right things or fit in, but I could do something well. I wanted to believe that I was talented; being fast was proof. Though I loved racing, the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.

I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors. I’m drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky. When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races.

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Byron

I e-mail one of my old coaches, Byron MacDonald, and ask to sit in on a morning practice at the University of Toronto pool. When I arrive, Byron and his assistant coach, Linda, are standing at the deep end, each holding a photocopy of the workout. They look exactly as I remember them. Byron still has a contained Roy Scheider swagger. Linda’s no-bullshit poker face is still quick to laugh.

The pool looks the same too. It has an odd palette for a swimming pool: orange, brown, and beige, with bursts of varsity blue on the pennants, the deck, and the seven letters of TORONTO spaced evenly between each of the eight lanes. When I swam with Byron, I’d wonder what practice was like from on deck, what it felt to be warm and dry up there, in sneakers and shorts. I’d always been curious about the tedium a coach might experience, while the rest of us, in the water, pushed against the thousands of meters of warm-up, main sets, 8