Joy Jot #25: The Dawn Treaders

The Dawn Treaders November 12, 2024

Three years ago, surprisingly, my knees started to swell and hurt after certain activities.

Lots of details I’m sparing you.🫠😂

Fast forward three years—with multiple physical therapy stints and a surgery—and I still don’t have the outcome I wanted: normal, working knees that allow me to do all the things I could do before, pain-free.

I remember, early on in my knee journey, people suggesting alternate activities I could do instead of the ones I wanted to do. This bugged me. I liked the activities I was doing, and trading them out just made me mad.

One of those “suggested activities” was swimming. Like, can you think of something less comfortable than going to an indoor pool in the winter in Utah? Um, no. What a hassle:

1. Putting on a swimsuit

2. Getting into a cold community pool

3. Walking to your car (wet) in frigid air.

It all sounded bad and undesirable.

Somehow, that happened anyway. The swimming helped my knees feel better, so I overcame the obstacles pushing against me.

But what got me there?

THE DAWN TREADERS.

Last summer, after a chance meeting at a lake, two friends of mine and I realized we were good at treading water. We joked about getting together in my friend’s pool to “tread.”

As a nod to the C.S. Lewis book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—and knowing my friends were literary (hoping they would laugh)—I created a group chat and named it “The Dawn Treaders.”

At first, I didn’t think anything would come of it, but I like to think the name encouraged us to do something about it. So we set our first “tread,” and we were hooked. We treaded water for an hour and talked.

As fall came and the temperature dropped, it became harder to convince ourselves to get in the pool.

We needed a motto to motivate us.

Our motto became: BE BRAVE.

We would tiptoe to the deep end and tell ourselves (and each other) to BE BRAVE before flinging ourselves in. 😂

Needless to say, after conquering my fear of swimming outside in November, when December hit, I was brave enough to accept the indoor pool situation for the winter.

Sometimes bravery isn’t just for the big moments.

What do you need to tell yourself to BE BRAVE about today?😂

With love and laughter,

Amy

P.S. Thank you, Dawn Treaders, for encouraging me to be brave and to help me accept an alternate way to exercise.