“The first six miles really weren’t that bad.”

This is how she put it.

“There was a lot to look at, all the bridges and buildings. But, once I passed under the Fremont Bridge…”

I had lunch with my friend Emily recently. She coaches swimming and she swims, as well. A few years back she completed—I think also won, but that’s neither here nor there—the Portland Bridge Swim.

As the website says, this event is your chance to “Swim 11 scenic miles through beautiful Portland, Oregon.” The course runs down the Willamette from Sellwood Bridge to St. Johns Bridge. If you’re from greater PDX and you know those bridges, think about the drive from Sellwood all the way to the St. Johns Bridge. It’s a ways.

Most people can’t swim a couple laps of a pool without stopping. The leap from floundering in your local swimming pool to covering 11 murky miles of Willamette River non-stop is tremendous.

When you think about the percentage of the population who can accomplish a particular feat, I’d says it’s like the difference between walking to the bathroom in your house and running an ultra-marathon. [That statement is thoroughly unverifiable, so let’s not quibble about it.]

It’s all relative.

You don’t swim 11 miles non-stop without some background. And you don’t do amazing things without working up to them. That goes for most anything in life.

You don’t write a novel without writing the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence of a novel. And before the first line of a novel there were thousands of pages of stories, essays, and drafts leading up to this journey. Plus the reading. Always reading. Sometimes it’s the great authors, often anything you can get your hands on.

A firefighter doesn’t run into a burning home on a whim. She spent years preparing for this. She lived a life with behavior rooted in the kind of character and tenacity that would lead to what years later we label heroism.

Everything impressive seems daunting from the outside. You have to break it down. Law school is a lot. Med school or piloting a helicopter are a lot. Smaller increments make them manageable.

Great events and great accomplishments are all relative. We would do well to celebrate the exertion and preparation leading to success as much as we revere a person when they reach the pinnacle.

This year’s Portland Bridge Swim is July 12^th. Odds are, you’ll reread the part about swimming 11 miles and think it sounds crazy. Just remember, it’s all relative.