Channeling Fourteen

Yesterday at Masters practice, one of my dear friends—also preparing for Nationals—asked if I was "freaking out yet." I laughed and said yes, but that I was slamming the door on the nerves because I don't have time for them. The truth is riskier than it sounds: disrupting the workout schedule, even to rest, unsettles bodies that prefer predictable routines to abrupt change. My friends and I hope the reward comes in faster swims, but there are no guarantees. We're all rolling the dice.

My first event is the 50-yard fly, and I'm chasing a time under 29 seconds for the first time in years. I recall racing the event at thirteen or fourteen in the Natick, Massachusetts town pond, representing my town of Medfield, where we also practiced in an oozy, shallow, algae-coated body of water that would horrify modern health inspectors.

I was shaking with nerves, matched against a well-known swimmer in my age group, a girl who excelled at fly. How they started us remains a mystery—it wasn't an electronic timing system!—but I remember diving off a slippery dock into murky waters of unknown depth, sprinting for my life. I wanted to beat this formidable opponent, who would become my college teammate five years later.

The race ended in my narrow victory. I don't even recall adults timing us, though they must have been swaying on those docks, struggling to hold their balance and stopwatches as we powered between thin white nylon ropes marked periodically with blue buoys. On the many-times-folded paper where I recorded all my times from ages thirteen to eighteen, I noted the result: 28.47. Won. I remember my opponent looking over at me—the unknown quantity—in surprise, hearing her ask people later, "Who was that girl?"

So I'm channeling my skinny, raw, untutored self, ready to launch off fancy starting blocks in one of the fastest pools in the country, wearing an expensive tech suit and hoping my decades of experience offset my decades of wear. My body has endured considerable trauma in the intervening forty years—two pregnancies and births, overtraining syndrome, autoimmune breakdowns, nutrient deficiencies, the relentless accumulation of miles and years. But I'm stronger now than I've ever been, fortified by knowledge and intention.

I'm excited to roll the dice and discover whether I can make fourteen-year-old Laura proud—that girl who dove into murky pond water without hesitation, who wanted victory badly enough to shake with nerves and sprint anyway. She didn't know about periodization or tapers, tech suits or underwater streamlines. She just knew how to race. Maybe that raw hunger still lives somewhere in these older bones, waiting for the starting beep to call it forward.