I’m an athlete.
And like any good athlete who never went pro, I peaked in high school, and ever since have watched professional sports not as an onlooker but as a self-titled sideline coach.
Damaging chips and dip more than a defense and whispering to anyone who might be listening how important keeping strikers offsides is in a World Cup game.
Sound familiar?
If not then you’re a better person than I. Consider it a stepping stone.
However, when my dad texted me in the spring and told me he was going to compete in a half Iron Man race in August close to Nashville (close, mind you, means over two hours away), I told myself this was one thing I could do so that he would never be able to accuse me of never having worked on our relationship.
Which is optimal, by the way.
I do my best not to fail, he does his best to hide his criticism.
Like I said: optimal.
I took this race as an opportunity to work towards a common goal together, hoping maybe it would take his mind off of the goals he would rather me work towards. In my family, we don’t do things halfway.
So this common goal was a 70.3.
A 1900 km swim
A 56 mile bike
And the cherry on top, a 13.1 mile run, or in layman’s terms a half marathon.
All in lovely 97 degree Tennessee August weather.
In my family, it takes things that have the potential to break to fix things that have been broken.
Fast forward.
I’m wearing a tight swim cap, tight triathlon shorts, and standing on a wet dock surrounded by an alienish crowd of similarly-clad triathletes. A sea of yellow-capped, anxious, muscular, tattooed humans staring out at the mile of water we were about to swim. And here I was, an anxious alien desperately controlling my breathing as I sized up the lake circumference ahead.
Anxious actually doesn’t quite cut it.
Terrified.
Yes.
Terrified.
The terror of understanding the full weight of what I had committed to do, and seeing for the first time in my life a mile of water between me and my goal of, not finishing, but beginning a 56-mile bike.
Now I’m a Louisiana boy through and through: I’ve seen plenty of water. Enough to know that the water I was about to swim was empty, at least in my terms. No alligators, snapping turtles, or even copperheads. Just fish,
Unlike me: a very muscular, non-fish attempting to do for an hour what they do for a lifetime.
And my terror slowed me down. Immeasurably. A swim that should have taken about 45 minutes (based off of how I had been training in between travel weeks) took me about an hour and fifteen minutes.
1:15
Because I was terrified.
The first buoy to reach was about a fifth of the entire distance I had to swim, and the moment I panicked was the moment I looked up after Aussie-crawling for what felt like fifteen minutes.
And I was halfway there.
Panic set in slowly, like how a chill creeps its way from your fingertips into your very chest, and I felt my heart rate increase as I looked around and realized I was the last yellow cap (these designate the ones dumb enough to attempt a half iron man) for a few hundred feet, and the next segment of the race, those attempting the sprint (a far smaller distance) were grouping up to start.
I looked down at my watch and realized my heart rate was at 175. I was freaking out. The realization that I couldn’t expend all my energy on this first event flared through my brain and I began to shift my focus from the yellow buoy to slowing my heart rate.
And I crept forward.
Foot by foot.
Painfully slow.
But slowly my heart rate sank and I began to breathe as normally as one can in the middle of a large body of water.
As my breath slowed, I rounded the buoy (after having a few of the kayak-mounted lifeguards verbally confirm I was doing “okay”), and set out for the next one.
And slowly my breathing stabilized.
I continued like this for about twenty minutes, swapping between freestyle and breast stroke (who named these anyway?) and keeping my heart rate down in the 140’s.
And then the realization that I was going to survive kicked in. Right about as I rounded the second buoy.
All of a sudden I became aware of the perfect temperature of the water. The sunlight dancing off the ripples, the splashing of the other swimmers around me. The lack of venomous creatures in the beautifully murky Tennessee water.
And I smiled.
“Oh,” I thought, “it’s just swimming.”
My friends. My family.
How many times have we been halted at an impasse in life, scared to move forward, scanning our surroundings in bleak despair, only to realize the way forward simply required moving, well, forward.
I, for one, have felt that way of late.
Psyching myself out with fears that may not ever come to pass. Attempting to swim the entire lake in my mind before I’ve crossed even the first buoy.
Before I’ve sunk into a rhythm.
Before I’ve sunk into a prayer.
And the warm, familiar embrace of my Heavenly Father.
You see, as powerful of a motivator as fear can be, there comes a point past frenzied action when fear transforms into a crippling, anxious force. A force that scares our childlike minds into going no further.
A fear that turns our tricycles around and crushes dreams that have only begun to breathe.
Sainthood, achieving the fullness of who we’re called to be, isn’t difficult. It’s just swimming.
But the fears wrapped around it like mangled hands make it seem impossible to achieve. The anxiety like a thorny weed that envelopes what once shone purely and undoubtedly from the bottom of our souls until all we’re left with is a heavy mass in our chest.
A lump in our throat.
A raised heart rate in the middle of a murky lake.
I can deny all I want that I’m scared. I can swim forward hard and fast as long as my lungs will allow for it until, tired of treading water, I slip under the surface and drift to the bottom.
I was made to thrive. To smile. To swim.
God help the evil one when I finally learn that instead of logically thinking through all the many fears he’s entangled me with, I must simply slow my heart rate. Acknowledge the sun. Acknowledge the waves. Put my face in the water.
And keep swimming.
It’ll be a red day for that little devil on my right shoulder. Hell, the current might even spirit him away.