Last week, I watched the Olympic trials for swimming. Swimming is my favorite Olympic sport because I was a competitive swimmer for 11 years from the age of 11 through my sophomore year at the University of Michigan.

A reporter asked one of the swimmers what his strategy would be for the finals against a very competitive field. The young man replied that he had trained for this day and that his job now was just to swim his own race and not worry about what others were doing.

That’s what I loved about swimming competitively. My race would be won or lost based on my own training and how well I performed on that day. No one was going to jump in my lane and stop me from swimming. My success or failure was up to my own efforts.

What do these lessons from swimming have to do with our walk of faith?