Morgan Stickney’s Race Against the Clock

Four minutes 40 seconds and change. That is the time marker, the destination, the magnet drawing Morgan Stickney ever closer.

For over a year, Stickney has been training diligently in a pool in Cary, N.C., slicing off seconds in her relentless pursuit of those prized numbers on a digital clock.

“That’s the goal,” Stickney said. “I’m going after it.”

The precise figure is 4:40.33 and it belongs to Lakeisha Patterson, who swam it in the 400-meter freestyle in the S8 classification at the Rio Paralympics in 2016. Patterson’s time is the current world record. It is Stickney’s irrepressible ambition to pass it.

She is currently a little more than three seconds off that pace. But she is getting…