Five Swim and Life Lessons from My Late Father, EP 285

Hello friends, it’s Kelly. You may have noticed I’ve been away from the show for over a month—the longest break I’ve taken in more than seven years of podcasting. The reason is deeply personal: my father passed away in August at the age of 95. I’ve spent these weeks with him, with family, remembering him, celebrating his life, and navigating the bittersweet gift of grief.

In this episode, I want to honor my dad, who first taught me how to swim. Through his simple “swim to Daddy” lessons on Lake Barcroft, he gave me some of the most profound truths I’ve carried into every stage of my life as a swimmer, coach and person.

I’ll share five swim and life lessons my late father passed on to me—about courage, trust, health, joy, and resilience. My hope is that these lessons touch your life the way they’ve touched mine, whether you’re a swimmer or not.

I'm happy to be back at the mic and look forward to connecting again with you soon! 

Email us at HELLO@ChampionsMojo.com. Opinions discussed are not medical advice, please seek a medical professional for your own health concerns.

Chapters

• 0:00 Returning after a month-long break
• 1:30 Dad's introduction to swimming
• 3:10 Five life lessons from swimming
• 5:50 Swimming as a generational gift
• 8:30 Dad's legacy and final swim story

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello friends, Welcome to the Champions Mojo podcast, where we celebrate the extraordinary stories of adult athletes who inspire us with their passion, comebacks and stories we can all relate to and learn from. I'm your host, Kelly Pallas, and I want to acknowledge the fact that I have been off from podcasting for about a month and I wanted to give everyone an update on that. It's the first time in almost over seven years that we've taken that long of a break and it comes on the heels of the passing of my father. He was 95. He had a wonderful life but he, as many of my swim friends know, he's been in and out of hospice for the last seven years and, as his only daughter, I've spent a lot of time with my dad over these years and then in mid-August he started to really take a turn for the worse and he passed away on August 24th and we had his memorial last week and I'm just wanting to do a podcast about some of the lessons that my dad taught me. He was the original swim lesson giver for me in my life and there are many lessons that I learned from my dad, but I want to stick with the theme of the show and also keep this to a rather short podcast, because if I listed all the things I learned from my dad we would be here all day.

Speaker 1: 1:29

But I do want to start off by saying I was really lucky to have two incredible swimming parents. But my mom did not know how to swim. She had watched one of her cousins drown in front of her when she was a young girl and she always had a fear of the water. So it was my dad who kind of stepped into the role of getting me and my three brothers into swimming, and not so much into competitive swimming but into just being comfortable in the water. We were lucky to grow up on a lake. We grew up in Lake Barcroft in Falls Church, Virginia, which was a very gentle way to learn to swim, because the beach, the soft sandy beach just rolled into a very shallow area and then it would just get deeper and deeper. So I wanted to just say that my dad was an excellent swimmer. He didn't in his youth have a lot of chance to swim competitively I guess they could have but he was from a small town in Kentucky and certainly was focused on raising his family and working and he just did not do swimming competitively. But he said his father would go to the local YMCA in Corbin, Kentucky, and swim laps on his lunch hour in the summer. So that was passed on to me of my grandfather was a swimmer who liked to swim laps. I think that went into my mind. But I want to just share five quick lessons that I learned from my dad introducing me to swimming and then how I've applied those to life, and I hope that this will be something that we can all relate to and learn from.

Speaker 1: 3:11

So the way that I was taught to swim which has been a joke in our home for many years, especially between my dad and I when I was little I couldn't even do any strokes, just the dog paddle. My dad would take me to the lake and he would say, swim to daddy, swim to daddy. And I would start to dog paddle towards him and he would just continue to back up, even though it looked like he was just four feet away from then. He would back up four more feet and then I would go eight feet and he would do this multiple times till finally either I was exhausted or he was exhausted, but I would end up in his arms and he would say look, honey, look how far you've swum. And he would point back to the shore and we would be for a little tiny child I would imagine at this point I'm three or four because I ended up being able to actually do strokes, probably at age five, and I would have swum 50 yards as this little tiny child, and so it was a really cool lesson in learning that I would go farther than I thought that I was capable of, and I think that was my big lesson that I was scared when I was going out. I knew I was getting into deep water, but that courage is not the absence of fear, it's moving through it, and that we can always go farther than we thought we could go. So my takeaway for that lesson is lesson one is courage over comfort, because I probably could have turned around at any point and gone back to the shore, which was a little closer originally, but sometimes life requires us to swim past our safe zones.

Speaker 1: 4:50

So the lesson two when my dad was stepping back, he was actually giving me some independence, some lessons in trusting myself and that I could do hard things, and that was also trusting him, that we do have to trust one another to be able to do things. We almost never in life accomplish anything on our own. So I learned through him that I could trust myself, that, yeah, I could make it to him, but that I could also trust him that he was going to be there for me. And I think knowing that we do have people that we can count on is a huge thing. It may not be your dad, it may be your mom or your brother or a friend, but knowing that in swimming and in life, that we can count on our swim buddies and our swim coaches and our swim families, so that was lesson two for me was that you have to have trust, but you also. You have to have independence, but you also have to have trust.

Speaker 1: 5:47

Number three is that swimming is really the value of health and it was a family value. I learned that from learning that my grandfather would swim laps at the Y on his work break, and so that is a huge thing, that swimming is a lifelong thing. So dad's encouragement of me to continue to swim he was always incredibly proud of me when I was younger, certainly, and he loved it when I got a scholarship to swim in college, but he was just as proud of me as a master swimmer, that you know, when I would come back to him in my 30s and my 40s and my 50s and my 60s, that he would always ask me it was a point of a family value, of him asking how's your swimming, How's swim practice, what are you? What meets, do you have coming up? It was a language of health and fitness and that was a lesson that he planted early in me and the ripple effect just goes forward through generations. Swimming is a generational gift Movement, health, self-care all generational gifts. So that was lesson three.

Speaker 1: 6:57

Lesson four that there was a lot of playfulness in swimming, that my dad taught me, and joy and in life. My dad was known for his sense of humor. He was always playing jokes. At the end of his life he would say he suffered a lot, he was bedbound a lot, he was in a wheelchair for a lot of his life, he couldn't walk towards the end and he would say that he endured with courage, suffered with dignity and prevailed with a sense of laughter. And that, of course, is a lesson all its own, but I do just remember him.

Speaker 1: 7:33

The artwork for this podcast is a young swim girl being thrown out of her dad's arms in a dive in the water and I wish I had that exact picture of my dad and I from that young age. But I used a beautiful replica of what my dad did with me in the lake so many times that I would launch off his shoulders and learn to dive off his shoulders into a lake. We played, we laughed, we splashed, we canoed with my three brothers and it was just something. That swimming wasn't just about grit, it was about fun and connection, and I still feel that today and I think when we can keep that joyfulness and playfulness in swimming, it's just a beautiful part of it. Whether you're going for records or you're just going to swim practice, it's still just, it's play, it's fun. So that was lesson four.

Speaker 1: 8:24

Lesson five and the last lesson is goes ties a little bit back to number one, but that we can always go farther than we think. It's just. That was something that my dad taught me in the last years of his life was he said he never wanted to be in a wheelchair, he never wanted to be bed bound, he never wanted to be incapacitated like he was for so long, but he just, he went through it, he went farther than he thought he could and living to be 95 in a really tough condition. But he did it, he endured it, he went farther than he thought he could and I think we can always all go farther than we think. We have this capability that we're always capable of more than we actually believe we are capable of. I think that's beautiful. And just to close out here and bring it back to my dad, I'm just so grateful that he gave me this love of the water and these lessons and the legacy and I will end on a little bit upbeat note here, this funny little joke that my dad told it's a classic swim parent exchange with somebody, and maybe those of you who've never done a summer league swim meet where there are just hundreds of kids and lots of parents volunteering.

Speaker 1: 9:47

My parents volunteered regularly and there's a position in summer league organization called a runner and the runner would take the swimming cards from the table down to the timer.

Speaker 1: 9:59

So that runner had to be quick to run the cards either from where they originated to the timers and then from the timers back to who was calculating the results.

Speaker 1: 10:09

And my dad was a runner. That was the job that he did in every single meet and so he was out somewhere and he said that this person came up to him and said, oh, I can see by your legs you must be a runner. And he said yeah, that's my favorite position when I'm at meets. And he said this person looked at him and they said, no, like a runner, like somebody that does 10Ks. And he said, oh, I thought you meant like my volunteer position at a swim meet. So he was so ingrained with being a runner at a swim meet that he didn't even it didn't even cross his mind that there were people that ran with running shoes and timed themselves in a 10K. Dad, I just I'm going to miss you like crazy and I'm so grateful that I got to see you live, to be 95 and share all this time with you and that you taught me how to swim and you showed me that I could always go farther than I thought, and this one's for you. I love you, Dad.