It's Okay
There are so many wonderful traits that my dad poured into me when I was a kid. Teaching me to do my best in everything that I did would have to be at the top of the list.
He didn’t teach me this concept through a Scripture verse or even reminding me every single time when I was studying for a test or perfecting my freestyle stroke; he did this through habit creation.
When I started swimming on a competitive year-round swim team as a 5th grader, he bought a swimming notebook for me, and he showed me how to use it. He had my name typed on the outside of it, and each page contained an event that I would swim in a swim meet. So for instance, the 100-yard Freestyle would have its own page, and then the 100 IM (Individual Medley) would have its own page, and so on. Each time I swam that event, I would record the date, my swim time, and the location in which the swim meet occurred. With each new time, I swam the event, I knew what my current time was and how I needed to cut that time. To be better, to be faster!
This visual taught me diligence (to keep up with the notebook), and it taught me drive (to swim faster). In the beginning, my dad would have each entry typed up, but later I started recording my own times, which would become habit-forming. It would be a habit that would stick with me all throughout my life. Just recently, I went through an old box with lots of sentimental items, including my swim notebook. It was neat to look at each page and look at the newspaper clippings of my swimming accomplishments that were in the back that I had forgotten about. Boy, did it bring back so many wonderful memories! My dad didn’t even realize this valuable habit he would instill in me as a 10-year-old would come out naturally in my adult life 40 years later. He had no idea that he was teaching me the scripture
Colossians 3:23: “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men.”
It’s funny, but I would go back to this way of thinking 40 years later.
In 2022, I wrote a swimming goal for myself – to cut my current time of a 1.2-mile open water swim from 1 hour 8 minutes (swam the year before) to under an hour. I thought that was going to be grueling but used the entire year to get ready for the open water race. Long story short, after the race, I received my time and I was truly devastated. I did not even cut my time, I swam it slower than a year before – 1 hour 11 minutes. I was so confused. How can this be? I felt so strong out there and so fast and smooth through the water. I then talked with some experienced open-water swimmers to get their thoughts. They expressed that since this is open water swimming, my swimming goal needed to be length-based and not time based since open water swimming has unknown conditions like the water current, rain, and temperature of the water, unlike pool swimming where all of these conditions are in a controlled environment. Since my younger swimming days were always in a pool where the conditions were controlled, then cutting my time from the previous race was a reasonable goal to have.
Failure is never any fun, but we always learn from it. I learned to grow from how I wrote my swimming goals as a ten-year-old little girl to how to adapt it to a different kind of swimming that is brand new to me – open water swimming. So just maybe I will have a swimming goal in the future to train for a 2-mile open water race or maybe to enter an open water race that is in the ocean. I don’t know. I do know that we don’t need to beat ourselves up if we do not obtain something for which we have reached and trained for months. It is okay. I also learned the process is so important. It’s okay if we do not meet our yearly goals but we were working on it all throughout the year, and that’s what is most important. We were consistent and our Heavenly Father helps us all along the way!