As you may know if you read any other posts (does anyone read my posts?), I have been swimming with a group on Monday mornings, in hopes of improving my swimming. We did an underwater video of ourselves swimming, to better evaluate our stroke/technique. I was really self conscious about this, as i am generally self conscious about anything in the exercise realm. However, other than an arm position and hand comment, the coach didn’t have a lot of feedback. No news is good news, right?

But of course i can’t just let it go. we’ve been swimming for 3 months now, and sometimes I feel like I still suck. I needed to know if that was just my insecurity, or actually true. So I asked,”do you think i’m getting any better?” he responded with,” do you feel like you’re getting any better?” “Yes, but i’m not watching myself, i can’t see myself swim.” he said,” you have a very smooth stroke. You don’t make many mistakes. you could kick more when you pool swim. You’re just not an aggressive swimmer.” Not like that was bad, just that this was a fact.

And as he said that, it was a ray of knowledge imparted to me. I’m not an aggressive swimmer. Or an aggressive biker, or an aggressive runner. I’m not aggressive at sports. I’m ok with that. I like doing things at my own pace. I challenge myself, but in small chunks. Trying to be better than my last time, or tackle this hill, or run for this much time. Aggression leads to life altering injuries. Your knee gets massively fucked up for life. I don’t need aggression.

Where this bothers me, is that my friends are faster. again this doesn’t really bother me, except that when we ride bikes together, or when we used to run together, they don’t want to go at my pace. Again, fine, but then we’re not doing it together. It’s like when the experts talk about group play vs parallel play in children. If you run an 8 minute mile and I run a 15 minute mile, we are not running together. Yes we are both running at the same time, but not together. So now the answer is, instead of them going slower or getting ahead and waiting, they just don’t invite me.

I don’t know what solution I am looking for. I myself don’t mind going slower for other people who are slower than me (yes it happens!). I’m not saying we need to bike together at my pace every day, but once every two weeks you can’t do a slow roll pity ride? Because i’m not aggressive, i don’t understand the need to push, to go faster all the time. Just take a minute and chill.

And I wouldn’t mind also if we all biked or ran separately. But it’s a group of people who all generally hang out together. Then 4-5 of them ride together and 3 run together, and I do everything by myself. I’m left out, and it feels like it’s because I’m slow, and I’m slow because I’m fat… do you see where I’m going here? I’m left out because I’m fat. There it is.

So somehow that has to not bother me. I have to let go of my friends non-inclusivity, not be hurt by this, see it as a reflection of them, not on me. Then I need to either find another group to ride with, or be ok with riding by myself and knowing that they are riding together and deliberately excluding me.

I want to clarify, these are nice people overall. They do good works in their lives and jobs, they help people, they are usually nice to me. It is mostly only in the athletic arena that their biases and selfishness shows through. And I have to think it’s because they are not the ones being left out.

Sports can bring out the worst in people. I hate competition, I hate competitiveness, I hate aggression. I don’t understand wanting to go fast over wanting to ride with my friends. But I also know a lot of people, specifically athletes, are like this. I can work on inclusivity in my own life, my own activity, and let the athletes be who they are. I am not aggressive, and that is what it is.