As a small child, I spent summers in pools, ponds, and lakes. Swimming came naturally to me, so I became a swimmer for my local swim team. Over the next seven years, I made close friendships with other swimmers my age while swimming became life. I attended every practice, even though others wouldn’t. My race times usually came close to the qualifying times of zone championships, but I never qualified. While this did feel like a failure, it wasn’t my greatest failure. The path to my greatest failure began during a summer swim meet. I swam a typical race, but my time was significantly slower than normal. I brushed it off as a bad race, but my time never improved over the season. No matter how hard I tried, I could never even take even a fraction
