Guest Post by Sarah

Pairs well with: "Mr. Roboto" by Styx

and "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor

Here are two things you may not know about me: 1) I was on my high school’s state champion swim team, and 2) I was an exchange student in Japan the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. These two things don’t seem to be readily connected, but they are. Boy howdy, are they ever.

First, the swim team. It’s a little disingenuous to throw the state champs part in there, seeing as how we became state champs after having one single solitary meet. I don’t even think we had a practice before the meet. We literally signed up for the swim team, found ourselves at a meet in North Mississippi, and walked away with the title. Apparently it had something to do with points and what-not, and we had two exceptional swimmers from Hub Fins on our team who kicked total ass in all of their races and basically won the whole thing for us. We didn’t have matching get-ups. No one even bothered to acquire athletic swimwear. One guy was rocking cut off blue jeans. He was the one we had to pick up in the school bus on the way to the meet because his car had been impounded the night before when he got a DUI. I think my BFF Kate may have been wearing a bikini. I know for a fact two girls on the team were smoking in the locker room. THIS was the state champion team from HHS in 1989. How mad was the team from Itta Bena in their matching warm up suits and Speedos? I think perhaps Andrea and Wayne, the expert swimmers, covered all of the individual races. The rest of us yahoos just focused on the relays. At one point during the boys’ relay, Tim rolled onto his back and floated for awhile. Swimming is hard, y’all. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time the doggie paddle stroke was introduced into a state sanctioned swimming event. The very last event of the day was the girls’ relay. I don’t remember what leg I swam. I just remember being stressed out that I didn’t know how to turn at the wall. None of us did. We had to swim all the way up to it, touch it, and turn around. Tres embarrassing. I’m sure my face was as bright as my neon orange, extremely high cut ruffled monokini (google it). And I remember that Kate was our anchor. When Kate held her nose and jumped in, the other teams were getting out of the pool. By the time Kate entered the final stretch, all other teams had dressed and were sitting in the bleachers. The water in all other lanes was slick. Not even a ripple. Bless her heart. It’s one thing to be an untrained swimmer wearing a bikini in a swim meet in the final leg of a disasterous relay, but to have every single high school swimmer and coach in the state of Mississippi bear witness is just overkill. But then! Just as Kate is about to complete what had to be the longest, most tortuous relay race in the history of the world, we found out that through whatever miracle of point counting and prowess of just two of our 10 team members, we had actually won the damned thing. As you might imagine, we went BANANAS, and started making total jackasses out of our state champion selves. Kate was hoisted out of the pool and carried out on our shoulders. Take that, Tutwiler Titans! You can keep your swim caps AND your goggles!  

And just how does this relate to being an exchange student in Japan? Well, it has to do with why in the world I signed up for the swim team in the first place, given that I wasn’t even committed enough to the sport to purchase proper attire. When I signed up, the goal was not to compete or master a sport or show school spirit. Rather, I needed to have something sports-related to put on my exchange student application. I needed to be—on paper at least—well-rounded, and being on a sports team was going to be my ticket to a scholarship. If you haven’t figured out by now, Kim is much more athletic than I am. Like the way Stephen Hawking is much more into quantum physics than I am. Walk 60 miles? May as well make it 600. Not gonna happen. But y’all. It worked! I got myself a scholarship to spend the summer in Japan. My host family was awesome, and it was an incredible experience. They were forever taking me to beautiful and interesting places, making sure I saw as much of Japan as possible. I also went to school for a bit. You haven’t lived until you have been forced to sing the Star Spangled Banner a capella on stage in front of 300 Japanese schoolgirls. Try it sometime. My host brother and sister and I also did normal, every day kid stuff around the neighborhood. We went to friends’ houses for cookouts, went shopping at the mall, and sometimes went to the neighborhood pool. One day, my host parents asked if we wanted to go swimming. Sure! Let’s go! So everyone went to change clothes and then hopped in the car. Usually we walked to the pool, but whatevs. I didn’t think much about it. Ken and Emi (my brother and sister) were awfully dressed up for going to the pool, and for some reason, they brought luggage with them. So curious. I myself had opted to just put on my trusty monokini and throw on an old Phi Kappa t-shirt and some cut-offs. After about TWO HOURS of driving, I was fully aware that we were not, in fact, going to the pool around the corner. As it turns out, we were headed to a resort in another city far, far away. A large, gorgeous, super fancy golf resort. I know that we were working with some substantial communication barriers (ie, my host family all spoke Japanese exclusively, and I knew not a word), but why didn’t someone tell me?! Domo arigoto, bitches. Besides being dressed like I was ready to float down the Okatoma, I didn’t have anything to change into after swimming. I realized that we were staying through lunch and dinner, so I would be sitting in the formal dining room after a day of swimming in a wet bathing suit and cut offs. I couldn’t have been more humiliated. OR COULD I??!!! When we got to the pool, my host father insisted that my host brother and I race. Yeah, you heard me. RACE. A swimming race. He kept saying “champion swimmer!” (Well, look who all of a sudden learned some English!) Like he was looking forward to me kicking his son’s ass. His son the “champion soccer player” with a washboard stomach and the wing span of a Cessna. No amount of demurring helped. Ken tried to get out of it, too. But no. Resistance was futile with Otosan. Y’all. I had to race this boy. Two lengths of an Olympic sized pool. Obviously there was no way in hell that I was going to come close to beating Ken. I just wanted to 1) not die and if possible 2) look like a swimmer that could have maybe somehow some way been on a swim team. Suffice it to say, it was horrible. When Ken realized how far behind him I was, he did slow up a touch, but not near enough to make the race even a little bit close. And when I tell you my lungs were on fire—I was convinced that if I did not have a full on heart attack, I would definitely projectile vomit in the fancy pool. As I finally touched the wall (do you know how hard it is to nonchalantly violently gasp for air?), I saw that my host father was genuinely and thoroughly confused. He shook his head, shrugged, and said, “Ah. Must be long distance swimmer!”

The lesson here, folks, is that you cannot always “fake it til you make it.” You can try, but you’ll probably end up looking like an asshat. Sometimes you have to do the actual work, create the reality instead of the illusion. You can’t just declare that you walked 60 miles in honor of a survivor or in memory of a loved one. You have to put one foot in front of the other for 3 straight days. Unfortunately, you can’t just call yourself a cancer survivor. You had to have fought for it—knowing all the while that there are plenty of people who fought just as hard but aren’t with us anymore. That’s why I’m so proud of and impressed by Kim, Cati, and the rest of Team Diamond Stone. What you have already done and what you will do this weekend is real. Y’all are true champions, and I love you for it.