Free The Sea of Light by Jenifer Levin Page B

the balls of my feet, trying too hard and I know it. No good. Screw all this for today, huh? Let’s call the whole thing off.
    The beep sounds like a mini-cannon. Dives, dives. I get off the block too late and know it. My timing’s shot from the word go and I know it. Plus, lately, my walls have begun to just suck. The first and only one’s still too far away.
    Spectator shouts roar to the high ceiling, an indistinguishable echo. In the bright-lit pool, bodies glide. This is the slowest stroke, the oldest stroke. It may appear to the observer to be a manifestation of perfect ease and grace, but from the inside when you do it all out, as perfectly and as fast as you can, when you do it to win then you look monstrous surging out of the water, a creature from some dark lagoon with foreign bug-goggle eyes. It wrenches every fiber of every muscle and it burns you all up with effort so that when you touch the wall to finish you have forgotten how to breathe, have forgotten everything but the naked agonized rasp in your empty lungs and heart. The 100 demands such complete control, so much raw strength. Yet the entire event will be finished in a little more than a minute. If you think about it, it seems unfair.
    That’s what I trained for every day since the age of six. Fifteen years. Two workouts a day including holidays, unless I was sick or tapering.
    Television cameras pan to a ceiling shot. Announcers’ voices pipe in louder than the shouts and echoes. All those experts, media talking heads, pretty faces whose agents have bartered with networks for their few minutes of air time. Their voices and comments will blare out to thousands of homes while I’m swimming—while I’m failing—voices I will hear later, cringing, because someone has thoughtfully recorded it all for me on videotape.
    “Uh-oh. It looks like Babe Delgado’s off to a slow start, John.”
    “That’s right, Bill. She’s a little late off the block with that dive. Now, she is the top-seeded swimmer in the final here of the women’s hundred-meter breaststroke—that means she came into this heat as the fastest qualifier. But if you’ve followed the career of this young lady, you know that she’s had some trouble maintaining a high level of performance this year and last—”
    “That’s right, John. Her performance has been erratic. You’re the expert! What accounts for this kind of slump?”
    “Well, Bill, it’s difficult to say. These kids train so hard for so long, you’ve almost got to expect it sooner or later. Who knows? Something’s got to give. But, believe me—and I went through this myself!—if you’re a true champion, you come back stronger than ever.”
    “Well put, John. Now they’re approaching the halfway point of the women’s hundred-meter breaststroke final, here in Indianapolis. Oh! You can see that quite a race has developed between Penny Johnson of Stanford—she’s in lane three in the middle of your television screen—and Martie Rourke of the University of Florida, in lane one. Martie is from Australia, but she goes to school and trains in the States—and if she can take this final, here in Indianapolis, what a surprise it will be!”
    “That’s right, Bill. Martie swims with the Australian national team. And it’s a testament to the toughness of this competition, to the high quality of the field here in Indianapolis today, that Australia’s national champion in this event could qualify no better than second to last. These kids are fast.”
    “It looks like Babe Delgado is back in the race now, John!”
    “Well, Bill, she’s playing catch-up right now. She can see Penny Johnson next to her in lane three, and she knows that she has to make up at least that half a length to beat her—see her looking over now! You never do that in the hundred, never! Babe Delgado has got to be a worried young lady at this moment!”
    “It looks like she’s pulling even with Penny Johnson, though! But she can’t really see