By Herbert Hadad

In most tales of athletic triumph, waves of cheers surround the hero, who stands bowed and tearful in the moment.

I have a story of athletic triumph. Mine is a little different.

Two years ago, fighting off a back injury, I was ordered by my doctor to start walking regularly in an indoor pool?Äîforward, backward, sideways?Äîto rebuild my weakened trunk and legs. I often uttered a mantra with each step: "Get better. Get better." This I did untold thousands of times.

Around me, men and women swam with various degrees of skill. Some slapped the water with their hands, suggesting wounded seals. Others glided and darted like sleek dolphins. I envied them all.

One woman, trim and fit, perhaps seventy-five years old, never spoke to me, but I knew she was watching. One morning, she finally answered my nod and hello. "I told my husband about you," she said. "I told him there's a guy at the pool I call the Walkman."

When I made trips to Europe and Asia, I tried to ensure the hotels I stayed at had a pool. In the pool in Prague, a little French boy and girl ensconced with their glamorous mother in an adjacent whirlpool made French baby sounds as I walked past. Being mature, I pretended to be a dog, "Ruuuff, ruuuff," and before their giggles had subsided, I was back again, "Meeow, meeow." It was all in the service of getting stronger.

In my local suburban New York pool, I watched instructors teaching children how to swim. One instructor was Lydia, a large olive-skinned woman of no more than twenty, with kind green eyes. I admired the way she cradled her tiny charges and coaxed them down the lane, praising them like a proud mother as they dog-paddled or kicked like a polliwog.

"When I'm better, can you teach me to be a good swimmer?" I asked after I'd gotten dressed one afternoon.

"Sure," she answered. "By the way, I love your FBI cap." I got her a cap; it served as our contract.

But one day I asked for Lydia and found out she'd moved to Florida. It was okay—I wasn't ready for lessons anyhow. In my middle age, I really couldn't swim. Even when I'd been entirely healthy.

Once when I was a boy at the City Point beach in South Boston, my dad walked me into the surf up to my waist. First, he showed me his sure and expert stroke, then he took me by the hands and pulled me through the water. He let go.

I struggled briefly before flipping over onto my back. Though I hadn't learned to swim, I suddenly knew how to float.

Last summer, I admired my own sons and daughter as they swam across Moose Pond in southern Maine, accompanied by friends in a canoe. They had easily mastered swimming as children at their local day camp.

They, in turn, always encouraged Dad's Big Dip. I immersed myself, preferably in seawater, at least once every summer. One time, staying in Hull, I entered the waters of Nantasket Beach by the old Paragon Park and was barely chest-high when the sky rumbled and the lifeguards ordered everyone out. That Big Dip lasted about thirty seconds.

The children didn't know I couldn't swim. My situation reminded me of Ivan in Greenwich Village, a friend of mine from years ago. Ivan was a handsome South American bodybuilder and artist with an attentive wife and two little children. He was fond of telling a particular story from his childhood, about his father rowing him out to sea, lifting him up, and tossing him into the water. "That's how I learned to be an excellent swimmer," he would say at evening get-togethers over wine.

One summer, Ivan's family was planning to visit his birthplace. Weeks before they left, my girlfriend and I visited their apartment. We found Ivan's wife, Hilda, beside herself, wretched with anger. She didn't know where he was. There had been other unexplained absences, too. "He's seeing another woman!" she said. "I've called the divorce lawyer. How could he do this to us?"

We tried to calm her by suggesting there had to be another explanation. "No, no," she said. "What else would keep him away? What secret could there be?"

But there was a secret, and Ivan saved his marriage by revealing it. His father had indeed thrown him into the sea. But, instead of toughening him, it had left him terrified of water. All the talk about his swimming skills was merely bravado.

With the trip to South America and its beaches looming, Ivan felt he had to do something. So he'd signed up at the Y for swimming lessons designed for people traumatized by water. Ultimately, he prevailed over his fear, and the four of us were able to laugh over our wine again.

Midway through my pool-walking regimen, I supplemented my "get better" mantra with lessons in Fundamental Arabic, which I studied at a local college. I photocopied key pages of vocabulary and text, and sealed them in plastic sleeves to protect them at poolside. After a series of laps, I could pause and study, then return to the walking.

If the swimmers and lifeguards heard me repeating "Hakeebatee bijanib ataweel" for "My briefcase is next to the table" or, more useful, "Alhumdu lilah, b'hair" for "God willing, I am fine," they kept it to themselves.

One day, my doctor said it was time, I could swim. But lessons were another matter. No one at the health club wanted to teach at 5 a.m. or 8 p.m., my available hours. I got a few tips from a congenial young guard named Doug, who had a large blue NY insignia tattooed on his left shoulder to illustrate his love of the Yankees. (He told me he had been sucker-punched in a Boston bar for his devotion. "Must have been near BU?"

I ventured. "No, it was closer to Northeastern, actually," he said.)

But the pivotal guidance came from an unlikely place. My wife and I had thrown a big party for my nephew Brian, an Army captain who was going off to the war in Iraq, and his fianc?©e, Angela. The morning after, I wandered into the kitchen, where Brian's brother Andrew was rummaging for breakfast. I told him about my quest. He became animated.

"I'm a triathlete," Andrew said. "I can show you some basics. Believe me, Uncle Herb, you can do it." And standing in the kitchen in the gloom of an early Sunday morning, he demonstrated the 1-2-3-kick, 1-2-3-kick you use as you propel your way down the pool on your back, hands at your sides, shoulders shifting in preparation to stroke.

"Once you're adept at kicking," he said, "you can backstroke, and once you're comfortable with that, you just flip onto your stomach and begin to swim."

It was amazingly simple advice, and, back at the pool, it proved to be true. A stout, powerful swimmer named Bob, who had seen me walk ceaselessly, stopped his own workout to show me how and when to breathe, how to have no fear of putting your head underwater.

I practiced that day and for several more weeks, coming up short, swallowing some of the pool, striving for a breakthrough. People in neighboring lanes cheered me on. Bill, a middle school principal and an outstanding swimmer, waited for me one morning to holler "Herb!" with a thumbs-up. A young, beautiful swimmer who rarely spoke said "Awesome!" to me after a workout.

And on another Sunday morning, I took a deep breath, kicked off, swam underwater, came up for a gulp of air, continued stroking, gulped air again, until I began to see the other end of the pool. "Don't stop. You can make it. Don't stop now!" I told myself. When my fingertips finally grazed tiles, it felt very good.

Popping up, I shouted to the lifeguards, "How long's the pool?"

They looked at each other. "Twenty meters," one said.

At home, I told my wife, Evelyn, about my morning as she prepared for church. She worships at the Union Church of Pocantico Hills. It has windows by Chagall and Matisse, and Rockefellers as members.

She returned a few hours later and reported that the pastor, as was his custom, had asked if there were any announcements or celebrations today. A woman said she'd been married for forty years. A man said his son had finally finished college.

"I raised my hand and said, 'My husband learned how to swim today,'" Evelyn reported.

"Then what happened?" I asked.

"Well, the pastor smiled," Evelyn said. "And the congregation erupted with laughter."

In the kitchen, so did I.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and award-winning writer, says that, over a lifetime of participating in sports from boxing to swimming, he's never taken a dive.