The Mrs. Coach Chronicles

The Hairless Wonders

2010-02-14T08:00:00.003-05:00

I know there are a lot of people in the swim world who think that British sports journalist Craig Lord singlehandedly brought about the banning of high-tech swimsuits. But, as I watched Mr. Coach watch his athletes with more trepidation than usual this past week, I realized there are other people who may bear responsibility for the demise of those full-body flotation devices. And that would be Messrs. Schick and Gillette, followed closely by Mr. Band-Aid and Mr. Neosporin. With the loss of the high-tech suit, we have regained a commitment to hairless bodies gliding through water, and I am sure these other gentlemen are very happy about that.

It’s been a few years, I’ve also realized, since the buildup to conference championships brought with it a nervousness that goes beyond hoping that everyone hits their taper correctly. It’s a nervousness that had Mr. Coach monitoring Facebook the night of the boys’ big shaving party for embarrassing photos and reports of uncontrollable bleeding.

Of course there are no such worries with the girls, but I don’t want to turn this into yet another “Differences Between Coaching Girls vs. Boys” blog.

Oh, who are we kidding, of course I do.

Difference No. 582: Girls can shave their legs without cutting off their legs.

Difference No. 583: Girls may come up with a lot of strange excuses for socializing (decorating baked goods for major holidays, scrapbooking, and discussing the moral failings of entire fraternal organizations) but removing hair from their bodies usually is not one of them. Shaving down is just one more of those purpose-driven activities with girls, so they tend to hunker down and “git‘r done” without the benefit of pizza or homoerotically-charged bonding rituals.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Some of my best friends have been men who shave their bodies and wear spandex, sometimes even latex, all year long, and they’re not even swimmers. It’s just that when they are swimmers, there’s an increase in giddiness and a decrease in fine-motor-skill control that makes their coach very, very nervous.

But you know what? It’s kind of nice to be buying Band-Aids in bulk again. As they say on those road signs on the way into Maine, it’s “The Way Life Should Be.”

* * * * * * *

And on this vivid note, I’d like to take my leave of the Mrs. Coach Chronicles. I never really thought I’d do this for as long as I have, but I also promised myself that I’d stop before I ran out of things to say. All I set out to do in the beginning was create a record of my family’s experiences in this sport, and I feel as if I’ve accomplished that and then some.

I’d like to thank everyone who has found the site and especially those who have come back every week for more. If you’d like to drop a line and say hi and introduce yourself, I’d love to hear from you (there’s an email link in my profile). It’s been an absolute delight to look at the site’s traffic reports and see some of the locations around the globe where people are logging in from. But if you don’t, that’s OK, too. Just know that I appreciated your taking the time to read.

And don’t worry – I’ll be leaving the site up as an archive. I’ve had some very kind suggestions to get this whole thing published as a book, but honestly, I don’t know of a publisher who’d go for something as specific in topic as this. But if you do, by all means, send them my way.

In the meantime, I hope that swimming and all that surrounds this crazy sport continues to enrich your lives the way it has mine. And think of these stories as having been my little Valentine to the world of sport.

Blame Australia

2010-02-07T08:00:00.003-05:00

So here’s a really dumb new swimming problem I’ve discovered that I have: my flip turns.

See, I first started getting somewhat proficient with this swimming thing about six years ago when the whole family decamped for Australia where Mr. Coach was doing his teaching sabbatical. He was working long hours at the Australian Institute of Sport there in Canberra (it’s like one of our U.S. Olympic Training Centers but with a looser dress code and more beer). The kids were young so I wasn’t able to get out for daytime runs very much. But I was able to go for lap swimming at odd hours like 10 or 11 p.m. because that’s how it is in Australia. They are not kidding when they say swimming rules Down Under. We were living in a city of about 300,000 people: Canberra had only one running track (at the AIS behind locked gates) but at least seven 50-meter indoor pools that were open to the public no less than 18 hours a day. So just for the convenience alone, I was doing a lot more swimming than I had ever done before, and the habit has stuck with me ever since.

Fast forward to Florida and six years later. For the first time since Australia, I’m having to share a lane with more than one person. At my home pool at Mr. Coach’s university, I rarely have to share a lane and when I do, it’s only with one person and we just each take one half of the lane. (And I’m not telling you where this pool is because I don’t want you showing up, thinking you can get a lane to yourself.)

So there I am, tucked in with my kids and the college kids, eight or nine to a lane, and I come flipping off the wall…and nearly plow right into whomever was behind me. This happened several times until I figured out how to either swim far enough ahead of people or far enough behind them that it didn’t matter. And of course it’s a towering testament to my swimming inexperience that I couldn’t figure out what the heck was wrong until a week later when we got back home. (I didn’t want to bug my husband with it because he had enough on his plate, dealing with a sociopathic bus driver and the daily onslaught of strained pinky toes on the team).

So you know whose fault my inability to flip-turn without giving myself a hernia was? Australia’s. I remembered that I had learned how to flip turn down there and come off a wall -- in a clockwise direction. Which is how they circle-swim in shared lanes in Australia. You flip over, push off and hang a right. And that really works well for me because I’m so dominantly right-handed. In the U.S., however, you need to hang a left coming off the wall unless you want to do a corkscrew to get yourself over to the other side of the lane (hey, I’ve met swimmers who like to get dizzy doing corkscrews).

OK, so you who have been swimming since you were toddlers are right now saying, “Ah ha ha, that dumb Mrs. Coach!” But you know what? You probably never thought about this until I brought it up. You learned how to do your counter-clockwise flip-turn when you were 3, and that was that. Granted, it’s not impossible to make the switch but, just like learning how to drive on the other side of the road, it’s a skill where I can’t just zone out and let instinct take over. I’m always going to have to remain ever so slightly self-aware and remember to turn left and not right. And that’s just ridiculous because I’m American and I am programmed to flip-turn like an Australian.

Bonus Round Friday!

2010-02-05T12:31:00.001-05:00

If you've ever wondered what Mr. Coach and his erstwhile English Channel swimmers look and sound like, this is your lucky day! They're the stars of some NCAA On Campus In Partnership with CBS College Sports TV thing this month. So have a peek and then say to yourself, "Yup, they sure do like they could use a new pool there."

Dwayne the Pool, Mama, I’m Dwowning!

2010-01-31T08:00:00.006-05:00

It’s that time of the year when little things mean a lot. One of Mr. Coach’s swimmers not too long ago posted on his Facebook page that pre-taper makes him feel like he wakes up with a hangover every day. Discounting the fact that this particular athlete wouldn’t know a hangover from a hangnail, he does have a point. During this part of the swim season, the athletes’ bodies are acutely sensitive to any stimulus.

We recently stumbled upon a new and unintended stimulus. Owing to an exceptionally dysfunctional relationship with the university’s maintenance staff, Mr. Coach walked into the natatorium a few days ago to find that about a foot of water had been drained out of the pool. Without warning, the maintenance staff had decided that this was the day they would fix a lane-line anchor they got a repair request for about 18 months ago. (I am not making this up.)

Well, it was what it was. Practices had to go on. But when your shallow end is only three and a half feet deep to begin with, that takes flip-turn precision to a whole new level. And when they were able to start refilling the pool, that also meant the water temperature was going to drop a bit. I came by afternoon practice just to see what it looked like. It was really weird how a different water level affected everything. The acoustics were different, the air temperature was different, seeing all the pool-length markings that are usually underwater was different. But, most importantly, the athletes were different, too.

Mr. Coach and I stood there and watched them, doing their warm up.

“I’m thinking this might not be such a bad thing,” he said while we watched the team, chattering giddily as they did their kicking.

“How’s that?” I said as one of the athletes did a turnaround at the wall near us and shouted up, “This is so weird!!!”

“They were really dragging an anchor last practice, which is normal this time of year,” Mr. Coach said, “but now….”

We watched as a bunch of them were jumping up and down in the really shallow end and some of them were repeating flip turns against the really shallow end’s wall.

“Now they have energy,” he said. “I might have to do this on purpose in the future.”

Consider yourselves warned, kids.

[Incidentally, the photo up top was taken on this particular day when the university's PR department, with whom Mr. Coach has an equally dysfunctional relationship, decided that they needed to take a publicity photo of some swimmers for a cancer-research fundraiser (notice the pink caps?) The drained water was about half-way refilled when the photo was taken.]

Everything You Ever Needed to Know about Mr. Coach…

2010-01-24T08:00:00.003-05:00

…you learned playing Risk with his son.

This is for Mr. Coach’s swimmers who were so very kind as to teach my son how to play that classic board game Risk when we were just down in Florida. I don’t think it took them long to regret that. No one likes to lose an entire continent to an 11-year-old.

But as tempted as I was to feel sorry for the guys, I realize this was probably a valuable learning experience for them. That’s because Little Mr. Coach is, in many ways, a carbon copy of his father. The swimmers can complain about every last curve ball that Mr. Coach throws at them in the pool -- the unusual workouts, the strange time-trial distances, the unexpected applications of PVC tubing and the second law of thermodynamics -- but at least now they know there’s a genetic component to the insanity.

You see, not long after Little Mr. Coach learned the basic rules of the Risk game – you roll dice, you acquire troops, you take over the world – the college-aged swimmers were complaining that he was hard to play against because he was so “unorthodox” and “unpredictable.” And your point would be what exactly, guys?

But what else did you learn about the Coach family males through the game of Risk? Well, you learned that the Coach boys refuel early and often with peanut butter and apples. And they’ll share what they have to eat but you better be prepared to share what you have -- even if all you have is a promise not to attack them in any Asian territories or to swim the 400 IM without whining.

You also learned that ADHD is not so much a learning need as it is a lifestyle choice. Now there are some people in today’s world who do consider uncontrolled energy and a fragmented attention span to be liabilities. I say they’re only liabilities if you think the ability to sit still and focus on one thing at a time is an asset. And last I checked, sitting still and focusing on one thing at a time was not in the job description for swim coaches. Or global domination.

Body Language

2010-01-17T08:00:00.003-05:00

Part of being in a “beachy” part of the world is that physical appearance seems to become much more important to people. Don’t ask me why, it just does. Whether people are stripping off the clothes or slapping on more makeup, it’s all about how they look. And that was definitely the case in Fort Lauderdale this winter.

In some ways, I’d say, this attitude has actually gotten more prevalent down there. I hadn’t been on the winter training trip to south Florida in a few years, so I was curious to see what had changed. All it took was one afternoon spent at a local arts festival to get my answer. As we pushed through the crowd, past the booths of artist vendors, I was dumbfounded by what I saw all around me. In fact I made a mental note to check the newspaper later and see if there was a “Salute to Dysmorphia” convention going on in town because I have never seen so many women (and more than just a few men) whose faces had been artificially altered. And not in a good way. Their faces were unnaturally smooth with big, blubbery fish lips and tiny, taut eye slits, but the rest of their bodies were naturally saggy and speckled, just as you’d expect from anyone in their gravity prone years. It was so bad and there was such a critical mass of these people stumbling around in bedazzled jeans and stiletto heels that my own children had to tell me not to stare.

At the other end of the extreme are the folks for whom it’s all about their bodies. I’ve long noticed an interesting phenomenon with some masters athletes: For each item of clothing they remove, their posture improves by about an inch. By the time they get down to the near-bare essentials, their heads are in the clouds and their abs are in your face. I definitely saw a few of these people strutting around the pool deck there at ISHOF. I never actually saw any of them swimming, but they definitely spend a lot of time wearing swim suits.

Of course with those who have a more functional relationship with their bodies (i.e., college swimmers putting in 10,000+ yards of swimming a day), appearance is not much of an issue. In fact a sure-fire way to tell if someone isn’t swimming enough is to gauge how much effort they’ve put into getting dressed. If there isn’t at least one greasy pizza stain on the sweatshirt they’ve been wearing since they got there, then you know they’ve got another 2,000 yards in them. Conversely, when they show up wearing some portion of the pizza, then you know it might be time for an easy day.

Road Trip

2010-01-10T08:00:00.007-05:00

So the Little Coaches and I went to Florida with Mr. Coach and the college team this year. Every year, all across this fine North American continent, swim teams of the college, high school and club variety head some place warmer (in theory) during their school breaks to train hard, work on their tans and spend waaay too much time together. By the time the 10-14 day experience is over, you know more than you will ever want or need to know about your teammates’ diets, deviated septums, dysfunctional love lives, and personal hygiene issues. On the plus side, though, you will find out that the kid from Wisconsin is an accent savant and does an Australian Christopher Walken that has to be heard to be believed.

I know this because, just to make this year’s journey a truly authentic experience, I decided that the kids and I would travel with the team. On the bus. In the past, I’ve always flown but this year, as I reviewed my options, I realized that every time I’ve flown during the holiday season, it has been an unmitigated disaster. It doesn’t matter where you go but if you entrust your carcass to an airline anytime between roughly Dec. 21 and Jan. 8, I can guarantee you will have a terrible experience. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a mother traveling alone with two small children: The airline agent will cover her monitor and attempt to convince you that you were booked on the previous flight. You’ll get bumped. You’ll sit on the tarmac for five hours of de-icing. You’ll spend the night in an airport you got re-routed to because of bad weather at your destination. You will regret ever leaving home, no matter how cold and ice-ridden it may be.

So I made the executive decision that the Little Coaches and I would join Mr. Coach and the team on the bus. And I don’t regret my decision in the least, especially not after reading that on a flight that I might well have been on the day we left Florida, some idiot stood up and announced he wanted to “kill all the Jews.” Who needs that, I ask you? Certainly not me. I’ll take 20-plus hours on a bus with two cases of intestinal disorders, six varieties of upper-respiratory disease, a “Jaws” DVD and a bus driver who may or may not have been part of a witness protection program over a bag of honey-roasted peanuts and the Second Coming of Hitler.

And it was a great trip, colder-than-usual weather notwithstanding. We went to the International Swimming Hall of Fame complex in Fort Lauderdale where the 318^th edition of the College Swimming Coaches Association of America winter training forum was taking place. Part of the deal was that the Little Coaches and I also had to swim. Not a problem. There is something very empowering about walking around the pool deck there in Fort Lauderdale as a 20 mile-per-hour wind and 57-degree temps buffet your soaking-wet body, especially when you realize that most people in your demographic are, at that very moment, dry, fully clothed and doing something to earn money. (You say “clinically insane,” I say “empowering.”)

I also put a dent in my open-water phobia by going coral-reef snorkeling in 10-foot swells. It was awesome and I know the divemaster dude thought I was crazy for sure when I asked him what the water temp that day was, and he said, “About 73 degrees,” and I said, “That’s perfect!” He replied, “That’s not what I would have said.” And I said, “You obviously haven’t been in my husband’s pool during the high-yardage part of the season.”

I’ve got other interesting experiences to share in my next couple of blogs, but suffice it to say, it was an excellent experience. Although if I never see another Transformer movie, I will not complain.

Gone Fishin'

2009-12-20T08:00:00.002-05:00

I’m going to take a little break for the holidays now. And when I return on Jan. 10, I promise I’ll have new adventures in swim-coach spousing to share!

In the meantime, just to make life easier for you all, here are links to what I’ve found are my most popular blogs. Most have made their way to this list because people obviously have a deep and abiding interest in water-based gender warfare. (I also have well-visited blogs because some people also have a deep and abiding interest in using search engines to find Internet content about MILFs and “boys in showers.” I have chosen not to spotlight those particular blogs.)

With a few others I’ve listed, it’s because they are also my personal favorites. Whatever brings you to this site, thank you very, very much for reading. I hope you all have a great holiday season wherever on this planet you are, and I’ll see you on the flip side of the New Year!

“Coaching Girls vs. Boys” – when this one first debuted on “another Web site” back in August 2008, it ignited accusations of sexism (I chose not to transport those comments when I set up this site in March 2009). Obviously the accusers have neither coached nor parented both genders.

“Coaching Girls vs. Boys, Round Two” – the evidence was piling up, so it was time to download some new observations.

“Coaching Girls vs. Boys, Round Three” – since this one ran in October, our hungry young man has added another entrée to his shower menu: pomegranates. You might think he’s just messing with us, but clearly you haven’t met Max.

“Are You There, God? It’s Me in Last Place” – this is probably my personal favorite. I live in a state that is arguably the buckle on the Bible Belt, and rarely a week goes by when I don’t thank God (or your Higher Power) for making Sister Caroline Mary a part of my education.

“Just Look at the Parents” – I wish I had transported the comments when this one first ran on “another Web site” because I heard from a swim club in Chicago that really had tried to recruit the oldest Obama child to compete for them after she aced their swim lessons. It’s a small world after all.

“Spouse Coaching” and “Spouse Coaching, The Return of” – these two have been visited quite a bit but the visit that gave me that heart-swell of authorial pride was the one that came in on the Google search term “coaching a paranoid spouse.” Likewise the visit (from Italy, no less) that came in on the search term “get your own damn dinner.” When you see that your words have gotten stuck inside someone else’s head like a cockle burr sticks to a sock, then you know you’ve made your mark in this world.

AIQ

2009-12-13T08:00:00.003-05:00

Most coaches are going to tell you they love to work with intelligent athletes, but most athletes will tell you that the competitors they fear most would flunk a CAT scan in search of brain activity. Why the seeming discrepancy?

Well, in the case of the coach, I think it comes down to a simple matter of communication. Who would you rather spend a 22-hour bus ride to Florida with? Egbert who brought the complete boxed set of “Arrested Development” with him and wants to analyze the influence of “Monty Python” on that TV show’s writing? Or Dortmund who’s been reading the same comic book for the last 275 miles – upside down?

Intelligent athletes are usually a dream to work with in practice situations. Maybe they ask a lot of questions but as long as you can drum up a reasonable answer, they’ll buy in and work hard. Toss in a research journal article with graphs to back up your answer, and they’ll work even harder.

But, as most coaches know, when it comes to competition, that’s where things get a little dicey. Egbert might have a sky-high IQ which is useful in the classroom but does him no dang good in a race. In races, it’s AIQ – Athletic Intelligence Quotient – that counts and a lot of very intelligent athletes don’t have a very high one.

In college, I’ll admit that I was an athlete with a solidly average AIQ. But I knew enough to know that the competitors who had trouble blinking both eyes at the same time were the ones I should take most seriously. And I studied them zealously, hoping to figure out what was different – besides the blinking thing. I can’t say as that I ever did figure it out. Some things you’re just born with – or without, as the case may be.

You see someone like Egbert – or me -- gets to the starting blocks. His brain has been rifling through the 3,578,913 different scenarios he has calculated could unfold during the upcoming race. He’s scanning his mental hard drive for his competitors’ previous best times. There’s a penny on the bottom of lane 5 and it’s really, really bugging him. He steps up to the blocks and the race is already over because, bottom line, Egbert’s brain doesn’t have an off switch.

Dortmund, on the other hand, steps up to the blocks. He doesn’t have an off switch either, but that’s because he also doesn’t have an on switch. Or at least no one’s ever found one. Dortmund can’t spell the word “scenario,” let alone envision one. And the only way he’d notice his competitors is if they walked up in high heels and blew him air kisses. All you do with Dortmund is tell him to go as fast as he can and, chances are, he will. Dortmund’s AIQ is through the roof.

Thankfully Mr. Coach, like most coaches, has learned how to work with the full spectrum of AIQs. You distract the Egberts with shiny mental objects (i.e., math equations) and you enjoy the Dortmunds for what they are.

And if anyone ever figures out exactly what that is, please tell me.

Poppies in the Stands

2009-12-06T08:00:00.003-05:00

Last week, for the first time in many years, I got to actually sit in the stands and watch an entire age-group meet. I watched every heat of every race, jotted down times, chatted with a couple of mom friends, dealt with the Loudest Family on the Planet, suffered a mild case of heat prostration, and fought to get my heat sheet back from some free-loading loser who parked herself near me and asked to look at my program and then didn’t give it back until I demanded it back. It was all wonderful.

See, for the last eight years, I’ve had to spend most of my time at these meets “in camp,” where the kids wait to get summoned for their races. As I explained to one of my mom friends who wanted to know why it took me so long to get out of camp, it’s partially because I grew up near New York City. I assume the worst of everyone when it comes to my children’s safety. I also don’t have very high expectations of their ability to get to the bullpen or blocks by themselves. We used to get rid of our daughter for hours inside the house by sending her off with instructions to bring back a (fill in the blank). That didn’t work with our son. Even if you gave him a list of 14 things to fetch, he would fetch them all in about five minutes flat. But Little Mr. Coach would and has consciously chosen a Pokemon-card trading battle over an A-final. So in camp I stayed.

But now our youngest child has arrived at the 11-12 age group and he is showing signs of, well, some would say maturity, but I would say it’s just a Machiavellian feel for what he’s got to do if he’s going to get what he wants (either more games for his Nintendo DS or a later bed time). So at his first indoor meet this year, I decided I was ready to sit in the stands.

And I have to give myself props for how it went. I have come a long way in my ability to tolerate loud swim-parent behavior. It’s been an issue because I’m not a screamer. I find that if I yell during my kids’ races it short-circuits something between my eyeballs and my brain, and I end up not really seeing or remembering their races. So, you say, just videotape them. Not really a videotaper either. So I watch pretty quietly and that way I can absorb what I’m seeing. And I’m not alone in this regard, though I have to cross the Equator to find other parents like me.

A few years ago, when we lived in Australia during one of Mr. Coach’s sabbaticals, our kids swam for a club there. I’ll never forget the meet where I was sitting on the edge of the pool as my daughter swam by in the backstroke. Because I was right there and she could see me, I figured I better say something so I leaned over and, at a volume that would be considered conversational at an American age-group swim meet, I said, “Go, honey!”

About a dozen Australian parent heads slowly turned as one to look at me. Then they all slowly swiveled back to reaffix their gazes on the pool.

“What did I do?” I whispered to one of my new Australian friends.

“You cheered for your own child,” she whispered back.

“OK?” I said.

“You don’t do that,” she replied. “TPS.”

There are many things I love about the Australian nation -- their desserts and dairy products probably foremost -- but their swim parents rank way high up there, too. TPS, as I found out, is what they call “Tall Poppy Syndrome.” Tall poppies are “made to be cut down.” In other words, you and your swollen pride are just asking for trouble if you publicly express a desire to see your child do well at something. You can – and should – cheer for other people’s children, but you don’t cheer out loud for your own.

Call it superstition, call it unrealistic, call it a bit too much humility, but I think it’s a great concept. And you can’t criticize a nation of swim parents who, when their children make the Australian Olympic team, don t-shirts with the acronym POOS printed on them (which stands for Parents Of Our Swimmers).

So, ever since I got back from Australia, I haven’t felt bad about being a non-screamer. And this time, my first time back in the stands for an entire meet, I sat there, cheered a little bit at a conversational volume for my son, and I didn’t get riled up about other people screaming. It felt good to be a short poppy.

Running vs. Swimming

2009-11-29T08:00:00.004-05:00

Before I was immersed in the swim world [yes, Kevin, that is a pun], I was part of the running world. It’s the sport my body was bioengineered to do and if it weren’t for the fact that bodies wear out, it would still be my only sport. But I’m trying to be smart about this wearing-out stuff, so a few years ago I finally jumped into the swimming pool [not so much a pun as a metaphor] and have since learned more about this sport than in all my preceding years of my marriage to a swim coach.

So now I get asked which sport I like better. And the answer is, duh, the one I’m naturally good at. But once that’s established, people move on to the question, “What’s the biggest difference between the two?” Besides the water thing, there are plenty of differences, I say. Track and cross-country meets take way less time than swim meets -- fewer events and they go faster. For that matter, so do practices: Running is way more efficient at destroying the human body. And when you run, you can get filthy dirty in a supremely satisfying way. I have never seen anyone leave a pool caked with mud [speaking of caked with mud: My alma mater team, Villanova, won its 8^th women’s NCAA cross-country title last Monday! Go, Wildkittens!]

But the biggest difference has to be the people that each sport attracts. See, with running, you’re lucky to get one genuine character per team. You know, a real nut job who’s only allowed to talk to the media with heavy adult supervision. Usually it’s a pole vaulter who’s missed the mat a few times [that’s not so much a metaphor as a medical fact].

But other than your one token character, a track team runs heavy [OK, that is a pun] on the side of serious intensity. I had this one teammate – one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet when she wasn’t kicking your butt in races. One semester I sat next to Joanne in a class. She would press her pen down so hard taking notes that a notebook page filled with her writing would curl up and away from the pages beneath it. I once tried duplicating the amount of pressure it took to make that happen, but couldn’t. Joanne could hide the intensity in everyday conversation, but not when she was taking notes.

I’ve met a lot of people like Joanne in track. In swimming, not so much.

With swimming, at least 25 percent of any team is visiting from another planet. And that’s a conservative estimate. I honestly don’t know why this is. I’ve hypothesized it has something to do with gravity. Running is completely beholden to the effects of gravity and it just beats the snot, poop and fun out of you. With swimming, though, you create this illusion that you’re defying gravity because you’re horizontal all the time, so maybe that loosens up the screws. Or maybe it’s just the chemicals in the water killing brain cells. I really don’t know.

As for which type I prefer to be around, well, isn’t that obvious? I mean, you don’t see me married to a runner, do you?

Disease and Dismemberment

2009-11-22T08:00:00.002-05:00

It was about this time last year when I wrote a blog about the spectre of illness that starts visiting swim teams right around American Thanksgiving time. I think the topic bears revisiting because, let’s face it, this year’s visit has already begun.

And this year we have the added hysteria of the H1N1 virus. Few of the college swimmers have been able to get vaccinations for it yet. One girl on the team was smart enough to catch it during the summer so that’s at least one athlete we can count on for conference. Another girl was diagnosed with H1N1 just the other week and then, after that, she developed a sinus infection, strep throat and an ear infection – in both ears. After the last diagnosis, while she was still leaking from every cranial orifice, she asked Mr. Coach if she could get back in the water. Once the penicillin kicks in, we’ll know if her brain got infected, too, or if it’s always been that way.

But it isn’t just illness. It’s the dumb accidents that are on the upswing again. The other night, I was driving with Mr. Coach and he gets this phone call. Here -- and I am not making ANY of this up -- is his side of the conversation:

“So is it broken?...No, if the kidney was sliced, she would have seen blood when she peed…Well then the kidney’s fine…Oh, they recognized you from this summer?...Were they still mad?”

One of Mr. Coach’s athletes had tumbled off the wide, concrete natatorium stands when she was doing some kind of dryland exercise. One of the seniors had taken her to the emergency room and was calling Mr. Coach from there. As it turned out, the tumble-down athlete had a bruised rib and the senior chauffeur got to re-meet the E.R. staff. The last time he met them – which they remembered quite vividly – was after a cycling accident he had and he was not a “good” patient.

As for the tumble-down athlete, Mr. Coach told me, “She’s not exactly a land animal.”

“Are any of them?” I felt compelled to ask.

But, to end on a happy note, the tumble-down athlete still competed in their meet that weekend, bruised rib notwithstanding, and she swam close to a P.R. in her best event. Before conference championships, we’re going to drop her off a cell-phone tower and hope for a world record.

Supplementality

2009-11-15T08:00:00.004-05:00

Here’s a random topic that’s piqued my curiosity recently: the issue of supplements, dietary and otherwise, in sports. I’ve always found the search for those extra little (legal) advantages interesting. In college, I had a coach who gave us Vitamin C tablets to chew all winter. I’m pretty sure all that did was wear down people’s tooth enamel and enrich the sanitary sewer system with citric acid. And there was a scary period when this same coach (who eventually got fired) gave a few of our teammates something called DMSO. It was actually a lotion that was supposed to facilitate workout recovery but we also heard it was made from petroleum by-products and it gave those who used it garlic breath for no apparent reason.

Holy crap. I just Googled DMSO and it’s short for “dimethylsulfoxide.” It’s a by-product of paper manufacturing and is now used as an agent for administering chemotherapy drugs and other “substances.” And one of its side effects is a garlic odor. Suddenly I feel a lot better about never having been a favorite of that coach.

Anyway, Mr. Coach hasn’t pushed it much with supplements. He’s had enough of an uphill battle teaching his student-athletes how to eat right, period. All the creatine in the world isn’t going to make a dang bit of difference if Trevor’s idea of dinner is four family-sized cans of Spaghettios, two boxes of Ring-Dings, and a liter of Diet Coke. Or if Buffy’s idea of dinner is a side salad without dressing, a carton of Eskimo Pies, and a liter of Diet Pepsi.

But I’ve always been a fan of the quick calorie after a workout. I’m all about the banana, granola bar or bottle of Ensure Plus – though not in the shower, I hasten to add (seriously: there is not one single woman I know who read that blog and could believe that guys eat in the shower. Not one.).

Anyway, lately I’ve been using this newish PureSport stuff (disclaimer: I’m not getting freebies here, nor am I looking to. Now Cheese Jax? That’s another story. I would give away naming rights to my children for some free Cheese Jax.). You’ll like my reasons for trying PureSport. See, last winter when Mr. Coach and the team were in Ft. Lauderdale for winter training, they did the city’s Ocean Mile competition. Reps for PureSport were giving away samples of the stuff – in the most adorable little pop-up plastic bottles, by the way. Mr. Coach brought me back the bottle but he was less than enthusiastic about the sample he had consumed.

“It went down OK,” he said, “but there was something wrong with the aftertaste.”

I was incredulous.

“No one is going to sell a product that has something wrong with the aftertaste,” I said. “That’s just insane.”

So you can imagine my excitement when the product popped up in our local grocery store (remember, I’m the woman who voluntarily sniffed my husband’s sneakers when he brought them home, reeking of his English Channel adventure).

I bought one in every flavor, determined to find out if the aftertaste on any of them was “wrong.” They were NOT. All I can figure is that the batch Mr. Coach got must have been sitting out in the sun too long at the beach that day. Maybe I’ll try leaving mine out in the sun sometime, just to see what happens.

But I’ve kept using these powder mixes because, even though they make me pee like a racehorse, they do seem to have an analgesic quality. Better yet, they don’t make me smell like garlic nor, as far as I know, are they a by-product of any industrial manufacturing process.

Great Moments in Age-Group Swimming History

2009-11-08T08:00:00.004-05:00

As the indoor season for all my little 10-year-old and under friends begins, I find myself thinking fondly about all the good times I’ve enjoyed because of them. It’s like I sometimes say to my own children, “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing near you.” And so it is with these swimmers as I record a few Great Moments in Age-Group Swimming History which have happened near me.

1) The Who Knew DQ: The first time Little Mr. Coach swam a 25-yard backstroke, he was disqualified -- for walking. He was only 6 years old at the time, so I wasn’t expecting much. But by that point, I had already been through five years of his sister’s swimming and she was a backstroker, so I thought backstroke DQs at that age were pretty much limited to turning over to look for the wall at the end. It wasn’t like the breaststroke where raising an eyebrow at the wrong time can get you disqualified. Well, Little Mr. Coach not only turned over, but he also decided to take a stroll. And somebody has taken the time to formally enter it in the rules books that walking (during any race for any stroke) is a crime against the aquatic gods. I learned something new that day.

2) The Domino Effect: During one meet this past summer, a chain of wrongful starts began and could not be stopped for several heats. It started in the 6 & Under freestyle when a kid from the following 8 & Under heat got confused because there was no one in his lane for the 6 & Under heat, so he dove in when the 6 & Under race started. Despite the best efforts of several coaches and parents, the wrong-heat starts continued through all the heats and both genders of the 8 & Under kids before order could be restored. It’s just the siren call of the empty starting block. Kids cannot resist it.

3) “If Two Trains Leave Their Stations…”: This was probably my all-time favorite Great Moment in Age-Group History. It happened this summer in an 8 & Under freestyle relay. Two boys (OK, let’s be real here – Great Moments almost always happen with boys) were poised on either end of the 25-yard pool. Boy #1 was swimming lead-off. Boy #2 on the opposite end was the second leg. The race starter gave the command, “Swimmers, take your marks…BEEP!” And in went Boy #1 and Boy #2.

It took a few seconds before the crowd realized the two boys were swimming straight at each other, and then the screaming began, trying to stop them. They never heard the crowd. But miraculously, the boys somehow managed to not collide and they safely reached the opposite sides of the pool and then the whole relay was disqualified.

Someone said to me, “I wonder what they thought when they went past each other.” I’ll tell you what they thought. One of them was thinking, “I hope they haven’t sold out of sloppy joes at the food stand yet.” And the other one was thinking, “Maybe if I promise to eat a baggie of grapes first, Mom will let me get the Sour Patch Twizzlers.”

You know I’m right.

Pool Polling

2009-11-01T08:10:00.001-05:00

Every election season we read all about the polls being taken on the candidates and issues. And we all stop answering our phones so as to avoid being polled. I have a little advice for the pollsters: If you want to get accurate information for your polls, hang up the phones and come to a swim practice.

It didn’t take long for Mr. Coach and me to realize that age-group swimmers, and even most college-age swimmers, are mirrors (and mouthpieces) for their parents’ political opinions and voting activities. You are not going to find many seven-year-olds who vote differently than their parents. If they could vote. Which they usually think they can. And you get to hear about it because a lot of talking goes on in a swim practice.

I can’t tell you the number of times Mr. Coach has come home and said, “You’re not going to believe who’s a Democrat.”

We live in a very politically conservative part of the world, so it’s always a surprise when you find out that someone’s a Democrat, although usually they’re a closet Democrat. Well, until their kid tells everyone in her lane.

As for politically extreme households, a really solid indicator of that is when a grade schooler knows about various issues on the ballot. Your middle-of-the-road households, whether Democrat or Republican, tend not to have strong opinions, at least not that they’re discussing in front of the children, about issues like casinos, smoking or even state-constitution amendments to beef up farming regulations. But your households that would say they “strongly disagree” or “strongly agree” about a ballot question do discuss these things in front of the children, and little Windchime and Thatcher will be more than happy to tell the Level 3 Mudskippers exactly how to vote on those issues.

I tell you all this not to make you more nervous about sending your kids off to swim practice. You’ve got enough to worry about with the bat hangs and other breath-holding drills. But if there are any hot political topics that you don’t want the other families on the team to know your opinions about, then you might want to be careful about discussing them in front of the kids.

Oh, and don’t worry, Mrs. Postlethwaite, about the Level 2 Lungfish knowing what your credit rating is. We had the coach explain it was just your age in dog years.

Getting In: The Regression Analysis

2009-10-25T08:00:00.003-04:00

For a coach, there is nothing more annoying than waiting for your athletes to get in the water. Most coaches can guesstimate pretty accurately how long it will take each athlete to get in. I think we can do better than guesstimation. I think we should run a regression analysis on this one.

When I was in grad school, I took a course on quantitative analysis which introduced me to the concept of regression analysis and it was love at first sample collection. Basically, it’s a tool of statistics which uses a mathematical equation to figure out how much influence various factors (independent variables) have on a particular outcome (the dependent variable). You can use it to figure out things like what demographic factors (age, gender, even eye color) best predict someone’s buying behavior. You collect as many samples as possible that measure the factors and outcomes, then plug the sample data into the regression equation and “run” the equation. The results tell you how significant each factor is to the outcome.

I took to using regression analyses for more useful things like predicting when a certain classmate was going to wear too much perfume (Thursdays, cloudy weather). I really impressed my classmates, though, when I used a regression analysis to break up with a boyfriend.

I told him I could build a regression analysis that would predict the next time he’d behave like a total farking icehole. Just the threat of running a regression was enough to finish off the relationship (which was the intended outcome), but a rough run of the numbers did find that proximity to an exam period had the best p-value (i.e., it was the most statistically significant factor).

Life with Mr. Coach has not yielded as many opportunities for constructing regression analyses, mostly because he’s something of an open book when it comes to his behavior. That’s nice for the health of our marriage, but a little boring for my Inner Statistician.

However, over the last year I’ve realized I have a prime opportunity to create a regression analysis with “getting in the water” behavior.

We have access to a wide range of swimmers in our life -- college, high-school, masters, age-group -- and they come loaded with juicy demographic information like gender, age, time zone of birthplace, birth order, are they more of a linear thinker (math/science/business) or an abstract thinker (arts/humanities), are they romantically involved with anyone also in the vicinity of the pool, what events/distances do they swim, what’s their grade point average.

The idea is to see which factors have the strongest link to the amount of time it takes for a swimmer to get in the water (as measured from the moment at which the swimmer appears within eye sight of a coach already on the pool deck).

Based on experiential evidence (because I have been fine-tuning this during the last year), I’m going to hypothesize that the factor profile on the swimmer who takes the least amount of time to get in the water is going to be either a 10-year-old female, oldest child IMer who gets straight As in school or else a 56-year-old male science professor who drives a fuel-efficient sub-compact.

Paradoxically, I predict that the athlete who takes the longest to get in will be a 20-year-old male middle child/linear thinker/sprinter who has been romantically involved with two or more people also in the pool vicinity.

Let the sample gathering begin!

How to Save a Pool

2009-10-18T08:00:00.016-04:00

So you remember my cousin TJ, right? The one who flings cats into pools to see if they can swim?

Well, he asked me recently if I’d feel comfortable using my blog to publicize a fund-raising event he’s involved with to renovate and re-open a pool in his northern Colorado community. And I said, “Heck, yes! There are days I debate using this blog to sell my children if I thought I could get away with it.” So helping my cousin do something that’s both legal and would benefit his community is a no-brainer.

And, almost even better, is the fact that the way TJ and his Loveland Swim Club compadres are raising money is crazy. Not like a little crazy. Like a lot crazy. They aim to get 3,942 individuals to each swim one length of a 25-yard pool in relay fashion in 24 hours or less (that’s an average split of 21.92 seconds per leg of this erstwhile relay).

Why 3,942? Because in January, 3,941 South Africans did it, and thereby got themselves into the Guinness World Book of Records (TJ’s a little fuzzy on the yards/meters differential, but he says their short-course yards pool fits the criterion). Anyway, if the community of Loveland can get this record back, I think it would do a lot to erase the sting of that 2004 Olympic victory by the South African men’s 400 free relay.

That plus it would help raise money to renovate the Loveland High School pool which has been shut down since 2002 when some authoritative agency deemed it “unsafe” because of its age and condition.

The Loveland High School pool was built in 1965. I would love to walk this authoritative agency through Mr. Coach’s current facility which was built in 1954. This should be its last year because the walls are going up, even as I type, on the new natatorium.

But a few missing tiles, a sinking foundation and a roof that lets in more air (and rain) than the actual ventilation system are no reason -- at least in our town -- to shut down a 55-year-old pool before a new one is built. Heck, there’s this one faculty member’s wife here who was complaining recently that she won’t swim in the current pool because the environment there is “completely toxic.” All of us who use the facility on a regular basis were like, “…and your point would be?”

(Actually I should never complain about people who refuse to swim in the current pool. Less people = more lane space for me.)

But in Loveland, they would probably love (no pun intended) to have too many people in a lane if it means they’ve gotten this particular pool renovated and back up to code. So what can you do to help? Well, if you’re within shouting distance of Loveland, fire up the snowmobile and get yourself over there to swim your length on the weekend of Nov. 6-7 at Mountain View High School’s pool. Conversely, if you’re already snowed in for the winter, then consider making a donation to this worthy cause.

For all the information you will ever need about this event, you can visit Loveland’s Web site. Tell ‘em TJ’s most fabulous cousin sent you.

Incidentally, the photos here were taken in our current facility by Marisa Obuchowski, one of Mr. Coach’s student-athletes, for a photography class. Isn’t it amazing how beautiful crumbling concrete and rusting radiators can look at the right shutter speed?

To Breathe or Not to Breathe

2009-10-11T08:00:00.007-04:00

With Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin’s participation on the TV dance competition “Dancing with the Stars,” a certain touchy subject has reared its head in the Coach Family household. And that would be breathing.

Apparently Natalie has problems remembering to breathe when she dances because she has spent most of her life reaping the rewards that go with not breathing. That’s because in swimming, when the going gets tough, the tough stop breathing.

Now those who are familiar with my heroic attempts to become a better swimmer know that I initially went into this swimming thing thinking that with my background in running, two of my most transferrable assets would be my lungs and my legs. As it turns it out, my best asset has been my cheerful disposition.

To be fair, I have made my peace with the kicking thing. Despite the handicap presented by my tragically narrow feet, I do not suck at kicking. And Mr. Coach has been extremely prudent to credit my genes for our kids’ excellent kicking cadences (they got his gun-boat feet, though).

But the breathing. Oy. I’m better than I was when I started but I still can’t comfortably breathe on both sides (unless I’m swimming with my pull buoy, Rodrigo – what? You don’t name your pull buoy, too?). Anyway, it’s better but I still can’t do an underwater 25, let alone a 50.

But everywhere I look with swimming, it’s all about cutting off the oxygen supply. Parents of football players may worry about the effects that repeated blows to the head will have on their children. I worry about the lack of oxygen.

My son, Little Mr. Coach, has great affection for one particular drill that he and his age-group buddies do. They call it a “bat hang.” They hook their legs over the pool gutter then lean backwards into the water and hang there, upside down and holding their breath in increasing increments of time. Like bats, hanging from a rafter. Except this rafter hangs over water and the bats aren’t breathing.

I sometimes cover family-court cases for my newspaper. If a parent did something like that to a kid at home, you can be sure the judge would have that kid in foster care by sundown. But within the context of a swimming pool, it’s all good!

So the next time the judges hassle Natalie about not breathing, I almost wish I could drag them to a pool and make them do bat hangs. If they’re not going to give her a 10 on dance merit alone, then a bat hang or two might shake a sympathy 10 loose.

Coaching Girls vs. Boys, Round 3

2009-10-04T08:00:00.005-04:00

Here is an anecdote which I think pretty much says it all about the sports-based differences between girls and boys. (You may recall this is a topic I have plumbed before, and those two blogs – here and here – are the ones that people return to most often on this site, according to my site traffic reports. Go figure.)

Anyway, the anecdote: Mr. Coach came home the other evening, proud to report that he had beat up good on the team that day. In fact he had beat up on them so good that afterwards, he said, he found one of the guys sitting in the shower eating an ear of corn.

Now a guy might read that and say, “Mmm, corn on the cob, that’s a good idea.”

Whereas a girl -- which is what I am -- would hear it and say, “People eat in the shower!?”

And a girl like me would be even more stunned to hear Mr. Coach reply, “Yeah. Guys eat in the shower all the time. What do girls do?”

To which I said, “Shower?”

And even that isn’t exactly true because -- and ladies, feel free to back me up on this -- a lot of women don’t shower in public after their athletic workouts. They will go home to their dorms, apartments or houses with that flesh-eating layer of chlorine or grime on their skin and shower up in private. And even if you do shower in public, there’s not a whole lot of social interaction that occurs. Women may be champs at multi-tasking, but in the shower, we tend to be very purpose-driven.

But apparently there’s a whole other branch of the food-service industry going on in men’s showers. Now I knew about chairs being dragged in, because I had heard about that years ago (again, never seen it happen in a women’s shower and probably never will), but I never realized the chairs are sometimes there to accommodate food consumption.

But corn on the cob? Now, to be fair, Mr. Coach said that was a first for him, too. Usually, he says, it’s things like apples, bananas and granola bars, but an ear of corn is a food choice he applauds (mostly because he really likes corn, too).

However I hear that and I’m thinking this wasn’t like a random “open the fridge and eat the first thing you see” food choice. This took planning. And transportation. And then storage for a few hours in -- what? A locker that hasn’t been disinfected since the Roosevelt administration. The first one.

So to sum things up here:

Girl + shower + corn on the cob = No. Just no.

Guy + shower + corn on the cob = Where can I get me some of that?

Lane Matters

2009-09-27T08:00:00.003-04:00

Aristotle was onto something when he started categorizing the hoo-ha out of every living and non-living thing. It’s only human nature to assign ourselves categories and if you need proof of that, all you have to do is look at a swim practice. The urge to sort themselves out by lane is primal with swimmers. You have these nice little slots to put yourselves in, so naturally you put some effort into deciding who goes in what slot and why.

Now, granted, most of the time it’s the coaches who decide who goes where. But for warmups, warmdowns and less structured workouts where you can choose your own lanemates, this is serious stuff. It’s like picking a fraternity or a sorority, except the workouts make it seem like the hazing never ends.

Lane selection can be competitive, sometimes even judgmental, and a certain type of prejudice called “lane-ism” can develop. I know of some high-school teams in the area who get rather hoity-toity about who gets shunted to the outside, slower lanes. To be a “Lane Sixer,” in one team’s lexicon, is a terrible thing. I don’t know, but if I were them I’d be afraid of the kids in those outside lanes. I’ve usually found the outside-lane dwellers to be intelligent and sarcastic. Show me a bright smart aleck who has found a reason to work hard at a sport they never win at, and I’ll show you someone who’s going to be signing Lane Three’s paychecks some day.

But with Mr. Coach’s teams, I’ve noticed that the swimmers mostly sort themselves out by communication patterns. Gloomy whiners (the “Eeyores, ” we call them) like to whine to each other. Dumb-joke specialists flock together and are ignored by the lanes on either side. Chirpy Pollyanna types are happiest together and no-nonsense masochists (often your distance swimmers) are unhappiest together. And Mr. Coach has identified a subspecies he calls the “Meek Tweezlies” who go wherever the Alpha Males or Females in their lives tell them to go.

Many lanemates develop bonds outside the pool as well. One group of Lane Four swimmers, past and present, will go out to dinner at local restaurants together and apparently are quite strict about not letting non-Lane-Four types dine with them on these occasions. Another recent group dubbed themselves “Lane Fun” and they’ve been quite aggressive with the recruiting. But that’s OK because they help each other create a happy water home.

The only type of lane you don’t like to see form is a Loveboat Lane because that always ends up being more like a Titanic Lane. Nothing sinks an aquatic romance faster than sloppy kickboard skills and fart bubbles. So if your coach tells you that you can’t swim with your GF or BF, just say thank you and go find yourself another lane. You’ve got plenty of options.

Archie

2009-09-20T08:00:00.003-04:00

Last weekend, Mr. Coach had to make a choice: He could either attend the American Swimming Coaches Association World Clinic in Ft. Lauderdale or head back to his alma mater, Illinois State University, to attend a men’s swimming and diving team reunion to honor their old coach. It was a no-brainer.

(Besides, he’s done South Florida in late summer before. Nobody needs to do that twice unless they’re trying to lose weight from sweating.)

So Mr. Coach talked Little Mr. Coach and me into coming along with him, and we had a jolly time of it. There’s nothing like walking into a room full of balding or gray-haired guys and being able to still see exactly what kind of people they were back when they fit Size 28 Speedos.

Even scarier is asking someone what their event was and their answer is pretty much exactly what you would have guessed. 200 fly guys have a pensive look to them, like they’re still looking for the wall. Backstrokers are wired kind of loose, although a couple I met had swerved in a more introspective direction. Divers – still neatly tucked and pressed. Sprinters – still loopy as all get out. Interestingly I didn’t encounter any breaststrokers, which I guess means they’ve either become hermits or have a short life span.

The reason why the group was balding or graying was simple: The ISU men’s swimming and diving program was among the earliest casualties of the misapplication of Title IX. Though the Act of Congress indisputably created much-needed opportunities for female athletes in the U.S., unfortunately some schools chose (and still choose) to balance out their male and female athlete numbers by cutting sports like men’s swimming, diving, gymnastics and wrestling. ISU lopped off all of those in the early 1980s.

But these guys weren’t there to dwell on that, which is admirable. They were there to honor their old coach with equal parts affection and insults. You’d have to know their old coach to understand why. And a lot of people do.

Archie Harris is a well-known figure in U.S. and college swimming. If you don’t know him from when he swam, you know him from when he coached. If you don’t know him from his amazing work with the Easter Seals Foundation, then you know him as one of the tall old guys who have run the College Swim Coaches Forum in Ft. Lauderdale each winter for the last 128 years. Archie wasn’t the tallest of the Old Farts (as Mr. Coach affectionately and bravely dubbed them), but he was easily the loudest. And they all have an unerring sense for figuring out who the most authority-fearing and nervous member of a team is – and then going after them for imaginary infractions. They tried getting me once for bringing a glass juice bottle into the facility. OK, they were right, but they didn’t have to be so loud about it.

Archie is 86 now and he (and his wife Harriet) retired from running the Clinic about three years ago. My husband was very keen to have our son meet one of the most pivotal people in his own coaching journey. On the first night of the reunion, we gathered for a social at a hotel. Mr. Coach introduced our son to Archie who gently held his elbow and pulled him close.

“Do you say your prayers every night, young man?” Archie asked our son. And I got a little tear in my eye, watching my son nod nervously and I thought with just a hint of melancholy, “Oh dear, Archie’s finally gone soft around the edges.”

“That’s good,” Archie told him and he pulled him in even closer.

“Tonight,” he said, “when you say your prayers…I want you to get down on your knees and thank the Lord…that you take after your mother.”

Now, I ask you -- who would not want to swim for a guy like that?

Lifeguard Cert

2009-09-13T08:00:00.005-04:00

I realize that, north of the Equator at least, I’m a little off-season with a blog about lifeguard certification. Most people get certified in the spring before the high-demand outdoor summer season begins. But we recently made Little Miss Coach get certified, so it’s still fresh in my mind.

The critical verb there is “made” because, while I know my daughter appreciates the opportunity to earn money for herself, the reality is Mr. Coach and I have been waiting for the day when we could have our own personal lifeguard. We’re not the first parents in our university community to do this. There are others who’ve gotten their kids certified for the express purpose of having a backup lifeguard for those days when the assigned lifeguard doesn’t show up. At a small pool with a small community of daily swimmers, it happens. But there’s nothing like being able to say, “Oh, I’ll just call Herbert and get him over here. He’s only sleeping.” And then, about 15 minutes later, you get in to swim while surly Herbert sits and watches and prays that his dad goes under just so he can not rescue him.

And now we can do the same thing to Little Miss Coach! For her certification, she got tag-team taught by her father and his assistant coach who are both Red Cross certified lifeguard instructors. Boy, was she psyched!

And she should be. Mr. Coach is very highly regarded in local lifeguard-certification circles, and most especially for his victim skills. As part of the certification process, the would-be lifeguards have to jump in and rescue drowning victims. Mr. Coach has two specialties: One is the Victim Who Doesn’t Float and the other is the Victim Who Fights Back.

Both “victimizations” are brilliant, but other instructors don’t like to bring Mr. Coach in for just any group of would-be lifeguards. That would be like using a howitzer to go bird shooting. No, rather, they tend to hold him in reserve for their big strapping college guys (and a few gals) who are going for the open-water lifeguarding jobs where they’re more likely to encounter difficult victims.

Your municipal and country-club pool guards might encounter a modified version of either the dead-weight victim who goes right to the bottom or the spastic-meltdown victim who could break your nose in a panic. But for the most part, they’re only going to be dealing with unsupervised 5-year-olds in the deep end.

In the open-water situations, that’s where a guard could go down with the victim if he or she can’t maintain control of the situation. So if a guard can get past Mr. Coach, you can rest assured they can wrangle in a drunken 27-year-old who can’t swim but decided to wade out over his head to retrieve a Frisbee.

But, for lack of any other victims this time, Mr. Coach was deployed on his own daughter. He decided to go with the Victim Who Doesn’t Float which I thought was an audacious choice, given that Little Miss Coach barely cracks 100 pounds on the scale. However I can understand the logic: Her skull is just as titanium-hard as his and the two of them have given each other black eyes before with accidental head butts. A Victim Who Fights Back would just be asking for another black eye.

So she brought in her dead-weight father without mishap, earned her lifeguard card, and now will be at our lap-swim beck and call. Who said parenthood was all give and no take? Certainly not us!

D3

2009-09-06T08:00:00.004-04:00

Division III (a.k.a. "D3") swimming is a breed unto itself. For those not familiar with this term, it refers to a particular category of U.S. universities under the umbrella of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (or “NCAA” to those in the know… “NCs” if you want make it sound like you’re a college sports veteran.)

Anyway, the NCAA is divided into three divisions: Division I schools tend to be larger universities and, as long as they have the money (an increasingly shaky assumption), they can give out sports scholarships. Division II schools tend to be smaller public universities and they also can give out sports scholarship money, though not as much.

Division III is what I call the “Chariots of Fire” division: Its founding philosophy derives from ye not-so-olde days when sport was viewed as a lovely part of a well-rounded lifestyle for which monetary compensation was viewed with disdain (like in the movie “Chariots of Fire”). Where a student-athlete spent his or her day developing a research project to restructure a small East Asian nation’s debt load, completing a vigorous workout in the pool while discussing Emily Dickinson’s mid-career poetry between sets with the other sprinters, and then dining with local dignitaries on oysters, terrapin soup and roast duckling, whilst using the correct utensils.

There also used to be a requirement that coaches of Division III teams had to be academic professors. That died out a couple of decades ago, though there are a few genuine professor/coaches left, including Mr. Coach.

Division III as originally designed was a lovely sepia-toned vision of "mens sana in corpore sano” (that’s Latin for “a sound mind in a sound body”). But “D3” has pretty much gone Technicolor and High-Definition now in its pursuit of “citius, altius, fortius” (that’s Olympic Latin for “swifter, higher, stronger”). Consequently we’re left with a division that is peppered with programs where athlete-students don’t have the time to do anything other than eat, sleep, swim and attend a few classes.

But not all of them are like this. There are still a few Division III programs where you get an intriguing mix of overachievers who are determined to cram everything into their days they possibly can…and then some. About this time of the year is when Mr. Coach finds himself having many, many discussions about time management with his young charges.

“Do you think I can take four science labs this semester, Coach?” one will ask him as they sit in his office.

“Only if your goal is to have a nervous breakdown by Halloween,” Mr. Coach will reply.

“But only one of them overlaps with practice on Wednesdays.”

“Even if you weren’t swimming, you wouldn’t take four labs in one semester,” Mr. Coach points out. “If you do, then I have to notify Counseling Services.”

“OK,” the student-athlete will pause and reconsider. “How about three labs, one Habitat for Humanity house-building project on Sunday afternoons, and the first bassoon seat in the university orchestra?”

That’s when Mr. Coach reaches for the can of wasabi peas in his top drawer. It’s not easy, but somebody has to coach these kids.

Wet and Dry

2009-08-30T08:00:00.004-04:00

As I have exhaustively documented, the life of a swim coach’s spouse is nothing if not exhausting. And one of the biggest challenges I face each year, right around this time, is learning to identify the newcomers. Usually they’re freshmen, but occasionally you get transfers or upperclassmen who have sufficiently recovered from the trauma of a bad high-school or club swimming experience to give the sport a try again.

But this isn’t a matter of just matching a name to a face and a set of details that Mr. Coach has heaved at me (which usually goes something like, “He’s the one from Kansas…5:06 but never trained right…6’3”, 130…and, best of all, he put ‘Monty Python’s Holy Grail’ down on the questionnaire as his favorite movie”; Mr. Coach takes great pride in his questionnaires. You can definitely tell a lot about someone from asking what their favorite color, workout, book and movie are. Or whether they even turned the questionnaire in. [Insert judgmental-raising-of-one-eyebrow emoticon here.])

But back to me. No, the hardest part with matching these names to faces is that I have to learn how to match these names to two types of faces – one wet and one dry. Most people look completely different when they’re dripping wet.

It’s not as hard with the guys. Thanks to the vagaries of male growth patterns, there’s enough variety in their builds to give me a running start on positive identification. The challenge is when your beanpole freshmen guys return from a summer of massive growth spurts and suddenly have pecs and facial hair. It’s like meeting a whole new person.

But generally it’s the girls who are hardest to sort out because they wear caps and sometimes I can go an entire season without seeing their hair until one day, Mr. Coach and I are walking in town and he’ll say hi to some bright-faced coed with an explosive halo of frizzy brown hair and, after she passes, he’ll be like, “That was Araminta. You know, the one whose mom brings soup to the home meets.” And I’ll be like, “Whaaaat?” because the Araminta I’ve met and even discussed soup stocks with does not have that much hair. And yet it is Araminta.

Sometimes Mr. Coach will bring in a batch of freshmen who, through no fault of his or theirs, all look alike. There was a stretch of about three years there which I refer to as “The Blonde Years” when every freshman girl had a round Caucasian face, shoulder-length blonde hair and no bangs. Some of them graduated without my ever addressing them by name because I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Blonde No. 3 or Blonde No. 14. I had to have stern words with Mr. Coach and motivate him to put a little more effort into the brunette and women-of-color department. Thankfully he has and I’m back on track. And now I’m back for another season of matching names to wet and dry faces. Wish me luck!

The Pre-Season Panic Season

2009-08-23T08:40:00.001-04:00

It is indeed that time of the year which we in the Coach Family household affectionately refer to as the “Pre-Season Panic” season.

Typically it begins a couple of weeks after the calendar turns from July to August. The subject awakens one morning (or afternoon, as the case may be). A stomach-acid panic attack suddenly grips the subject when it spies the pile of luggage and empty boxes that the subject’s mother has dumped on the floor of the bedroom some time during its slumber.

The subject stumbles to the bathroom and steps on a scale – only to discover that it cannot see the numbers on the scale because of the bulge of flesh blocking the view. The subject sucks the bulge in, only to confirm that it now has less than a month to regain the fitness and physique that will enable it to “fool” its college swim coach into thinking that it spent the summer doing triathlons, hiking the Appalachian Trail and putting a new roof on the local convent like it said it would back in May. (When, needless to say, the subject’s main accomplishment that summer had been something that involved five wooden palettes, 12 yards of surgical tubing, one herd of Guernsey cows, and a Latvian au pair.)

The subject lumbers into the kitchen where its mother has already laid in a supply of rice cakes and protein shakes. The industrial-sized box of Sugar Bomb Oaties has been discarded. After a 14-calorie breakfast (or lunch, as the case may be), the subject spends the next half-hour in the basement, digging through boxes still unopened since May until it finds a pair of goggles and a swimsuit, both caked with mildew but otherwise useable. And then it’s off to the local pool where the subject puts in a brisk 8,000 yards of swimming (half of it with a pull-buoy because too much kicking too soon is bad for the…well, it’s just bad).

The subject does not swim for the next five days but does ingest the maximum allowable daily dosage of ibuprofen and rice cakes. And it does go bike riding once with its grandmother who dusts the subject going up that one hill. The subject feigns a groin injury then drives Granny back to the nursing home.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the subject maintains a scrupulous regimen of dwindling swim yardage, run-jog-walks around the neighborhood, more ibuprofen, and building a tan which would bespeak a summer of vigorous outdoor activity. By the time the subject returns to college, it has whittled two inches off a well-tanned waistline but gained an additional five pounds (all muscle, it insists). The coach takes one look at the subject, rolls his or her eyes, then says, “Open swim’s from 11 to 2 each day.”

Welcome back, kids!

Channeling Peace, A Story in 427 Parts

2009-08-16T08:00:00.005-04:00

I realize that the most efficient way to finish telling you about the Channeling Peace Initiative of 2009 would have been to write it up and post it last Sunday. But that would have been to assume that Mr. Coach had already told me everything that happened such that the narrative of their adventure could just write itself.

But that would also be to assume that Mr. Coach thinks in narrative form. And he doesn’t. It’s more like bullet-point form. And there’s no telling what’s going to shake a bullet point loose. The other day, it was the smell coming out of the kitchen garbage can. Next thing I knew, he was out the back door and then back in again, carrying a pair of sneakers that had been sitting outside since he got back.

“Smell this,” he said, holding them up.

I know, I know. Probably not the smartest move, but seeing as how Mr. Coach is not the type to abuse the privilege of telling me to smell random things, I thought, “OK, what the heck.”

The shoe smell was a doozy, immediately summoning childhood memories of when our dog Bobo went swimming in the creek.

“That’s the English Channel,” Mr. Coach said proudly. The shoes were the ones he wore for David’s relay swim on Thursday, Aug. 6. They had gotten soaked but good, not during the 13 hours and 25 minutes it took to get to France, but on the 3-hour boat ride back. He had spent it on the back end of the boat, getting splashed by the waves. We agreed he could pitch the shoes and get new ones.

So little pieces of the story keep dribbling out. There’s been the story about running into a guy from Chicago who swam for him 10 years ago: They were all visiting Dover Castle at the same time. That was a little surreal. I’ve also heard about the meat pies and the hikes through the English countryside.

If you followed along on Facebook, where I was posting the URLs from GPS pings that David’s mom sent out every 15-60 minutes, you know that we were following the team’s progress across the Channel (they showed up as a little green arrow on a Google map). They started at about 9:30 a.m., their time in Dover (4:30 a.m. my time) and went until 11 p.m. their time (6 p.m. mine). The relay consisted of 21-year-old David, 71-year-old Stanley (founder of the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in Florida), Clive who is British and that’s all Mr. Coach is remembering right now, and Ann, another Brit about whom he also remembers little except she’s dreamed of swimming the Channel since she was a little girl (I wonder if that’s a British thing).

Toward the end, we noticed that the little green arrow started drifting south and further away from Calais, France, which is the traditional destination. Anne, a veteran Channel swimmer, was serving as our online expert analyst. She’s done several solo crossings herself, including a “there and back” double. Ouch.

Anyway, Anne explained to us online that currents and winds out of the ENE were probably pushing the swimmers southwest. They would be aiming for a small bit of beach just south of the lighthouse at Cap Gris-Nez called “Dragon’s Teeth.” If they didn’t make it, she explained, they’d have to either head further south toward Boulogne-sur-Mer to find land-able shoreline or wait until the tides change and double back around the Cap toward Calais. Either way, it would be another 5 or 6 hours of swimming if they didn’t make it to Dragon’s Teeth.

We watched online as the arrow finally righted itself and began heading due East toward the Cap. If you clicked on the satellite version of the Google map, you could see this was where the water color changed from dark blue to light blue, but you could also make out how rocky and steep the French coast was with one small clear spit of sand.

“now is where the swimmer must sprint to make land…if they pass Cap Gris Nez it will be a while…”, posted Anne.

And at that moment, Mr. Coach remembered a couple of days later, David was indeed sprinting across the strong current. He got them to within 400 meters of shore, and then in went Stanley who was the swimmer to make land. He picked up souvenir rocks for his teammates, tucked them into his swim suit and then rode the accompanying dinghy boat back out to the waiting Viking Princess fishing boat where everyone else was.

They ate scones and jam on the boat ride back (during which time the weather disintegrated). But David’s mom’s Dramamine worked this time and she was fine. Wet and cold, but otherwise fine. David was very sore the next day, but now Mr. Coach has something to heave in his face the next time he complains about fly day during the college season.

And Usman did his long-distance swim in solidarity with David, two days later in a 25-meter pool in Pakistan. He swam for 8 hours and was probably a babbling idiot by the time he was done. I saw what he was like, back in April, when he and David did a four-hour swim in the university’s pool, and it was not pretty.

It still doesn’t make much sense, why the British government wouldn’t issue Usman an entry visa to swim the Channel, but I'm not going to dwell on that. Instead, I’m going to dwell on the fact that Mr. Coach just told me that he thinks the university team should make this a biennial or triennial thing, to take a relay over and swim the English Channel. They want to keep the Channeling Peace movement going. That’s great, I said. I just want to know who’s going to pay for all the new sneakers.

Navel Gazing on a Friday Afternoon

2009-08-09T08:00:00.002-04:00

So, I’m writing this on Friday, late afternoon. Mr. Coach is somewhere in England right now, making his way to an airplane tomorrow. I’ve pretty much made up the lost sleep from the two Channel crossing events of this past week. I cranked out a few stories for my employer, the newspaper. I fielded a few emails from parents of age-group swimmers who want to plan their autumn schedules. Now. I ran a few times. I swam a few times (until the university’s maintenance staff closed the pool without warning for repairs. Not that I’m bitter or anything.) I went to a swimmer wedding. I oversaw Little Mr. Coach’s preparations for a kids’ triathlon that he’s doing tomorrow morning. He’ll do it and when he’s done, I’ll entrust him to the care of Kevin, who will pick Mr. Coach up at the airport while I fetch Little Miss Coach from the week-long workshop she’s been attending for her school. That’s only an 8-hour round-trip drive. I do have plans to make sausage calzones tonight for Mr. Coach’s welcome-home dinner tomorrow. There’s nothing good on TV but there’s Leinenkugel’s Red Lager in the fridge.

In other words, it’s been a pretty normal week. You know, one of the things I was hoping for when I started doing this blog more than a year ago was that it would bring a few other swim coach spouses out of the woodwork. I figured we could commiserate with each other. But that hasn’t been the case. Though I’ve heard from lots of really nice people, I have never heard from any other coaching spouses. (Interesting side note: the “traffic reports” that I get from having this site on Blogspot tell me what the search terms are that lead some people to the site. Most of them are just “mrs. coach blog,” but there are others I’ve started keeping a list of because they’re just so…interesting. Like “coaching a paranoid spouse,” “national velvet gertrude english channel” and, my personal favorite, “boys in showers.” I’m probably not getting a lot of repeat visits from that last one. At least I hope I’m not.)

But I’ve realized, from a year or so of doing this, that 1) not a lot of women interact online about sports, and 2) not a lot of coach’s spouses feel the need to connect. And that’s OK because probably most of us are too busy being the air-traffic controllers in our family’s lives to have time to connect.

Although, I have to say, during my first year of marriage to Mr. Coach, I was taken out to lunch down in Fort Lauderdale by some of the other coaches’ wives, all of them in the 60+ year-old phase of life. Mr. Coach said they were softening me up so that some day we’ll agree to run the winter training camp down there. And as I sat there with the ladies, some of us face-down in our margaritas at 2 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in December, I thought to myself, “You know…I could get used to this.”

But the truth is -- and this is part of why it's still fun even after almost 18 years -- is that you never really do get used to it. There’s always going to be some new challenge heaved your way, whether it’s a new pool that only took 17 years to secure funding for or a pair of athletes who decide they’d like to swim the English Channel. There’s always something new.

(Oh, and next week, I promise I’ll do a wrap-up on the whole Channel relay experience because I’ve got some seriously good stories to tell about that.)

Once More with Feeling

2009-08-06T08:24:00.008-04:00

Channel Swim, version 2.0. Around 9:30 a.m. (British Summer Time), David took off again, this time as part of a four-swimmer relay attempt to swim across the English Channel. If you have access to Facebook, please join the Channeling Peace Initiative group (it's an open group so it shouldn't require any administrating to join). I'm posting the "GPS pings" that David's mom, Tami, is sending every so often. It's a really fun way to "watch" the progress!

*****

Edited to add at around 7 p.m., EDT: We just got phone calls from the boat, letting us know that after 13 hours and 25 minutes of swimming, David and his three teammates successfully swam across the English Channel. They made landfall about 11 p.m. BST near the lighthouse at Cap Gris-Nez. David was not the last swimmer who got to go ashore, but his teammate brought him back a souvenir French rock (or "caillou" for you purists). He also made a new friend along the way -- a seal who swam with him for a while in an epic show of inter-species solidarity. Now they are headed back to Dover on the boat, and are eating scones and jam! Thanks, everyone, for following along today!

Just Keep Channeling....

2009-08-03T15:25:00.004-04:00

Right now it's getting on to supper time over in the U.K. My husband had said he was going to take a nap after this morning's attempt but I have a feeling he's been too adrenalized to do much sleeping. There have been a few emails with references to long hikes along the coastline. Dick got to swim a bit with David during the nearly four hours that it took David to go an estimated 10 kilometers (that's 6.2 miles to us Yanks), but I know all their brains are still whirling.

Copied below is Dick's first collection of thoughts on the attempt. I hope you enjoy reading it as much I did:

"What David did today was amazing and I am beyond proud of his accomplishment of swimming for nearly four hours in his channel-crossing attempt. He endured a physical challenge that most of us will never understand. This takes a very special type of motivation, one that not all of us possess. While David had some external motivators, his mom, Tami, the boat pilot, Andy, myself and even chocolate, none of these have the ability to drive someone to what David accomplished. To overcome what he endured and to keep going for the period of time he was swimming takes extreme internal motivation. Those of you who know David understand this attribute and yes it is even stronger that the promise of chocolate. The success in this crossing attempt is not in the completion but in the intended goal, process, experience and what is learned. We never really expected David to make this solo crossing but instead to swim as far as David possibly could in the conditions on that day. He did that and will take this experience with him the rest of his life.

I feel disappointed for David and Usman in that they will not get to do their Channeling Peace Initiative relay across the channel as originally planned. After what I witnessed today, I feel quite certain that they would have been successful. It would not have been easy, but they could have accomplished one of their goals in the intended endeavor.

It was not the intent of the Channeling Peace Initiative to have David attempt a solo English Channel swim. Due to some bumps along the path to the intended endeavor, when Usman’s visa request was denied, David and Usman agreed upon a backup plan. This new plan included a solo channel attempt by David and a virtual channel swim by Usman in his pool in Pakistan. We now anxiously await Usman’s swim in Lahore, Pakistan in the next few days. It is so wonderful to see the resourcefulness of these two young men when faced with a challenge over which they have no control. They have kept the real meaning behind Channeling Peace alive with their ability to adapt. And as Usman put it in the CNN article: "Even if I have to swim in a lake in Pakistan while David swims in the English Channel, it's still a powerful symbol."

"Symbols gather power not from the act itself but from the people who are supporting them," he said. "A lot of people around the world are supporting us and our message. As long as they support it in their hearts and minds, we have been successful." "

Off to Channel Some Peace

2009-08-03T09:01:00.008-04:00

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the text message letting me know David took off this morning (around 4 a.m. Eastern US Time/9 a.m. British Summer Time) didn't toddle in for several hours. But he's off and we're trying to determine if Usman also was able to start swimming in his home pool in Lahore, Pakistan, at the same time. This was the Plan B we had hoped we wouldn't have to implement, but we did.

Here are the first and second GPS pings I have received from Tami, David's mom, on board the boat which is piloted by the able Andy King. The first was from 9:06 a.m. BST and the second was from 9:48 a.m. Looks as if the currents pulled him a little bit south but that sure likes he made a lot of "ground" quickly. The weather report right now from Dover shows that it's 72 degrees F/about 20 degrees C, partly cloudy with light winds out of the south.

I haven't received any other communications since then, so it's possible they're not able to send anything from out on the water. My husband's text said they wouldn't have email access out there as they had first thought they might. (We get so spoiled with all our instant communications, don't we?)

So, it's time for prayers and positive thoughts -- that's OUR part of the relay!

****

Not much later, I have just received this post from David:

Hello all.

I am sorry to announce that I did not make it across the Channel. Nevertheless I gave it as valiant an effort as I could.

The first hour went smoothly, making good time and breaking briefly for a feed. Half an hour later I threw up four times (unpleasant experience!). Over the next two hours I found myself throwing up an additional seven times and unable to keep down even plain water. Needless to say, after an additional half hour and still without fuel, my stroke had clearly deteriorated the pilot became concerned about how much I was shivering. Shortly there after, the decision was made.

While the result is not as enticing as the idea of reaching a French beach, all us here are proud of the effort made. There were a lot of unfortunate and unpredicted hurtles preventing our original plan of a relay with Usman and I. But we continue to try and make the best of the situation. Usman is in the process of planning his own long-distance swim in Pakistan, and David has been invited to participate in an additional Channel-swimming relay later this week. More updates will come for both of these, and as always, thank you, all of you, for your continued support!

Sincerely,
~David

Well, I don't know about you folks, but I don't think any of that is any excuse not to keep sending prayers and positive thoughts to the guys! Bravo!

The Virtues of Slowing Down

2009-08-02T08:00:00.008-04:00

Well, while we’re waiting for the Channeling Peace swim to get cranking (read the latest surprising news in the entry below; I’ll keep you posted here and you’re also welcome to join the Channeling Peace Initiative Facebook group), I thought it might be fun to pay attention to what’s been happening in the world of pool swimming.

As anyone who’s been following the FINA World Championships (of swimming, diving, water polo, synchronized swimming, open-water swimming and synchronized underwater ice hockey) in Rome knows, FINA -- swimming’s organizing body – has decided that the high-tech suits which have enabled the rewriting of the record books over the last two years will be banned as of Jan. 1, 2010.

It’s been an interesting two years, watching the suits creep into the world of competitive swimming. Mr. Coach was dismayed and opposed to them from the start when Speedo rolled out its LZR suit in February 2008. (Me too.) He called it when he said the LZR suits and every polyurethanic abomination that followed would quickly make their way into even age-group meets, would create more entry barriers with their exorbitant costs for underprivileged athletes and financially-strapped college teams, and would undermine the integrity of the sport because the suits made folly of basic technique and training wisdom. When he asked the other coaches in his collegiate conference to forgo the suits earlier this year, all he got was a chorus of crickets and one long-winded email dissertation from one coach that could be summed up in one sentence: The ship had left the harbor, so wave bye-bye.

Guess what? Last week the ship returned to harbor. Somebody must have discovered it had a rudder. So while the braying of Internet haters (nearly all of whom are suit lovers) will likely continue for a while, I hope the rest of the swim world embraces this return to pure swimming with positivity. I’ve always maintained that swimming, like running and wrestling, is one of the only pure sports, where all you really need to do it is your body. (That’s not to say other sports are impure. I just find this detail interesting.)

But there will be one significant obstacle that athletes will have to surmount now -- and I’m sure it will yield a couple hundred studies to be published in the "Journal of All Things Exercise Physiological and Polysyllabic" -- and that is: How will athletes deal now with going slower? How will they learn to accept slower times when they’re working just as hard, if not harder, than ever before?

To which I say: Welcome to my world! I know ALL about working hard and going slower. Actually anyone who’s ever gotten older (studies prove this happens to about 99.9 percent of the population) knows what it’s like to work hard and go slower.

It happens and somehow you find new goals and redirect your mind (and body) to them. That’s what these elite athletes are going to have to do as they kiss their personal records goodbye. They can organize the numbers however they want: pre-suit, during-suit, post-suit, whatever it takes. The sooner they let go of those during-suit numbers, the sooner they’ll get used to feeling – and enjoying -- the pure water on their bodies again.

A Break in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

2009-07-30T21:35:00.005-04:00

Please forgive this gratuitously personal interruption in my regularly scheduled programming, but a journalist is nothing if not timely with the late-breaking news.

Just a few hours ago, a story went out on the CNN.com newswire about the Channeling Peace Initiative. I've written about this endeavor before on this blog, and just this past Sunday I packed my husband, Mr. Coach aka Dick Hawes, off at the ungodly hour of 4 a.m. to get to the airport for his journey to England. Two of his Ohio Wesleyan University swimmers, one an American and the other a Pakistani, have been preparing to swim the English Channel for a two-fold purpose: one, to demonstrate the power of international friendship to create peace in troubled times; and two, to raise money for the Doctors Without Borders program.

Last Friday, we learned that the British government had denied Pakistani student Usman's application for a visa entry on the grounds that they could not confirm he was a student at an American university and that his sole purpose for entering the U.K. was to swim the Channel. They made this decision despite the fact that his U.S. student visa was attached to the passport which they reviewed and that his contract with the Channel Swimming Association also was included.

At this point, my husband, American student David and David's mom Tami are in Dover, U.K. Usman is still at home in Pakistan. Each day we all try navigating some new tack in our attempts to get Usman his visa to join them. A small army of alumni and friends from American and Pakistani communities have all been helping work the channels, if you will, that they have to various government agencies. The CNN article was written by the stepdaughter of David's high-school swim coach.

The young men's assigned window of time to attempt the swim opened on July 28 and will run through Aug. 6. Plan A remains getting Usman there. Plan B emerged just the other day -- when the guys weren't keeping themselves from going stir crazy in their respective locations by taking Facebook quizzes like "Which Victoria's Secret Angel Am I? (David is Allesandra Ambrosia and Usman is Heidi Klum). Plan B involves David attempting a solo crossing (with my husband pacing him) while Usman swims in either a lake or a pool in Pakistan at the same time. The two teams supporting them would be in touch via cell phone.

My husband thinks that David can pull it off if he has to. They've been training each day in the Channel since they got there. Dick reports that it's not the water that's tough to deal with. It's the "beach" you have to walk across to get into the water -- it's all jagged rocks and pebbles. And he says the "ice cream headache" from the slightly nippy water (low 60-degrees Fahrenheit) goes away pretty quickly. Well, isn't that comforting to know?

So I tell you all this to solicit your prayers and positive thoughts for the guys' success. It's more than just a little ironic that one country not feeling very friendly toward residents of another country is what threatens to undermine David and Usman's original plan to celebrate the power of international friendship. But it's more than just a little fitting that friendship will find a way to make something good happen, no matter what the obstacles are.

The Bullpen (aka The Seventh Circle of Hell)

2009-07-26T08:00:00.005-04:00

Until the last night of summer swim league championships this past Tuesday, I had thought, “Maybe I’ll blog this week about how much fun it is to sit and eavesdrop on the kids, as they hang out in the team camp, waiting for their events.” This is how I get caught up on all the latest high school gossip and on my Pokemon card-trading strategies (Squirtle eventually evolves into Blastoise who can pull water cannons out of his shell and has 100 health points. Who knew?).

But then the mom who rounds up volunteers came looking for people to work the bullpen on the last night of championships, and there went my peaceful evening of eavesdropping. Oddly enough, in all my years of swim parenting and coach spousing, I had yet to work a bullpen. Now I know what I’ve been missing and I have the aching back and roughed-up vocal chords to remind me, just in case I forget.

The bullpen, for those of you who know how to evade volunteer coordinators, is the place at a meet site where swimmers are corralled, sorted into events and heats, told they can pee in the water if they really have to go that bad but they cannot leave the bullpen for the bathroom now, and then marched out to a pool deck where, half naked, shivering and surrounded by fully clothed, screaming adults with video cameras, they have been conditioned to fling themselves into cold water when a buzzer is sounded and they cannot get out again until they are exhausted and disoriented by oxygen deprivation. It’s like a cockfight, only less humane.

But I wouldn’t know how the pool part of the evening actually went that last night because I was working the bullpen. We had 64 chairs set up under a tent, eight rows of eight chairs each. For a little while, it was only 63 chairs until we figured out that some woman (in a Hermès scarf, I feel compelled to note) had stolen one so she could sit and watch her little muffin swim in the kiddie pool. I sent the bullpen mom with the loudest voice to go get it back. It wasn’t easy but she got the job done.

We chased hovering parents out of the bullpen – also not an easy job. Yes, I realize that all this chaos could be emotionally scarring for little Dagmar or Robespierre, but two minutes before we ship them out is not the time to rethink your decision to sign them up for the swim team.

We stared down TWA (Tweens With Attitudes) and threatened them with disqualification if their eyes didn’t stop rolling in their sockets. We negotiated with coaches who insisted that “the other half of the B relay is here…somewhere…they just might not make it to the bullpen…but don’t scratch them.”

And we did have the heart-warming experience of being able to put one alternate into a race when a kid did not show up for finals. Those first and second alternates are the ones who tug at your heartstrings because they do show up and stand outside the bullpen, waiting patiently and hoping against hope that they’ll get another chance to swim. As with my beloved 6 & Under swimmers, these are the kids who remind me why an aching back is a small price to pay for inspiration.

The Birthday Workout

2009-07-19T08:00:00.004-04:00

I don’t know if other people are the same, but I put quite a bit of effort into planning my Birthday Workout.

This ritualistic homage to my own birth started when I was a high school runner. I decided that, since I was born at 6:33 p.m., I needed to be running at that exact moment every year on my birthday. And for many years I did just that -- until one day in my early 30s when I suffered a terrible realization. For all those years of birth-moment running, I had been living in the Eastern U.S. time zone – but I had been born in the Pacific U.S. time zone, which meant I had been running three hours too early every year. I should have been running at 9:33 p.m.

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out. As anyone who knows me will tell you, details like that don’t usually escape me because my brain is a graveyard for minutiae. Need to know the N.Y. Yankees’ starting lineup for the 1978 World Series? It’s in there. The middle names and birth dates of all my grade school classmates? Yup, they’re still in there, too, taking up space that could be better devoted to remembering when I last changed the oil in the car.

And yet, this detail had eluded me and that irked me to no end. My slavish devotion to the moment of my birth was tainted by operational error.

Well, you say, just wait til 9:33 p.m. Look, I don’t know about you, but by 9:33 on the balmy summer anniversary of my birth, I prefer to be digesting a filet mignon, a twice-baked cheesy potato and a spinach salad with sliced strawberries and Catalina dressing. And I’d rather have a snappy little Shiraz, and not a cocktail of adrenalin and lactic acid, coursing through my veins. In other words, a 9:33 p.m. workout is not an option.

So it was back to the drawing board for the Birthday Workout. Over the course of the next few years, I expanded my workout repertoire to include yoga and swimming. With the Heavy Heart of The Deeply Disillusioned, I continued to do some kind of “special” workout on my birthdays, but I wasn’t feeling the love...until I hit 40 and stumbled onto a new Birthday Workout strategy.

Inspired by my husband’s triathloning, I decided to create my own Birthday Triathlon. That first year, it was 40 minutes of yoga, 40 laps of swimming and 4.0 kilometers of running. Each year, I’d add another minute, length or repetition of whatever I decided to do.

It was after my 44th birthday, two years ago, when I made the swimming segment 44 50s that I realized I had a potential problem. 44 50s wasn’t a problem now, but thinking ahead to, let’s say, my 95th birthday, it might be. I could just see it now: The EMT squad would show up to fish my corpse out of the pool. What would they write for “cause of death” on the official report? “Stupidity.”

So I thought, well, what if I keep adding minutes and repetitions til I get to 50 and then start subtracting them until I zero out on my 100th birthday (when you figure it’ll take the whole day anyway for my 104-year-old husband to serve me my Birthday Dinner)? But that felt too Countdown-ish to Death, so I quickly nixed that idea.

So that leaves me back where I started – working out at the anniversary moment of my birth.

I only have to make one slight modification: We’ll have to move to Hawaii.

In Praise of 6 and Under

2009-07-12T08:00:00.005-04:00

I used to think there was nothing better to watch in all of swimming than the 8-year-old & Under age group. But then our summer swim league added a 6 & Under age group, and suddenly Wednesday nights in July got a whole lot better.

“But, Mrs. Coach!” you say. “You’ve been to national meets and seen amazing feats of swimming. You’ve been to an Olympic Trials meet and seen world records happen. And just last night, you were parked in front of your laptop, watching the U.S. World Championship Trials, live and uninterrupted by commercials. Surely one of those meets was the best thing ever to watch in swimming!”

To which I say, “Have you ever seen a 6 & Under 25-yard backstroke?”

We’re talking two, sometimes three, minutes of dramatic intensity, the likes of which Shakespeare himself couldn’t match. There is always, and I do mean always, the quivering excitement of the start. There are legs and arms akimbo, bouncing off lane lines like protons and neutrons inside a nuclear reactor. There are near-drownings (when was the last time you saw that at an Olympic Trials)? There is the agony of victory when somebody finishes the race with their noggin, and there is the thrill of defeat because last place always gets a rousing and heartfelt ovation from the crowd.

There is not a single kid out there who is not giving it his or her all -- an “all,” I might add, that is accomplished without the assistance of buoyancy-aiding, high-tech suits, although occasionally some of the boys finish without their suits if they didn’t tie the drawstrings tight enough.

And there is not a single kid out there who is going to take that race home with them to fuss and fume and obsess about, because most of them have the attention spans of gnats at this age. They’re only in it for the chili dogs and Cherry Slushies.

None of them are going to flunk a drug test because they bought a “bad batch” of Flintstones Chewables. None of them are academically ineligible to compete because some of them haven’t even started school yet. And the only way any of them will end up in an embarrassing YouTube video is if their parents put it there to show the relatives out in Oregon.

So you can have your world-record swims in perfect pool conditions. You can take your collegiate Division I prospects and give them all ice bags for their blown-out shoulders. You can have your Olympic Hopeful 12-year-olds. The only races I will drop everything to watch this summer are the 6 & Unders: They’re everything that’s great about this sport.

It’s Never Too Early to Prognosticate

2009-07-05T08:00:00.002-04:00

…And finally we get to the centerpiece event of this year’s Tattimuck County Parks and Recreation League Championships – the Boys’ 10-and-Under 100-yard Medley Relay. But to assess the players this year, we have to go back two years to the Boys’ 8-and-Under edition because that’s the last time this particular set of swimmers went head to head.

Two years ago, it was the Killer Sharks of the Mango Park Swim Club who took the title, not so much because they were the fastest quartet but because they were the only team that wasn’t disqualified. Led by backstroker Fred “Floater” Zingermann, the team also featured breaststroker Jonathon “Two-Hand Touch” Wing, butterflyer Charley “Wiggle” Wiggins and anchor freestyler Sam “Scooter” Schnipke. And two years ago, they put together a performance that left even their parents stunned and speechless. Insiders say the Mango Park boys are older and more legal than ever, even though they lost Wing to the country-club league when his dad got a promotion at work. According to their coach, Mindy Schwicker, the game plan is to have Rafael Esterhazy, a 7-year-old with a pituitary-gland disorder and hands the size of dinner plates, swim up an age group for the breaststroke leg.

The Killer Sharks likely will be challenged by their annual nemeses – the Waterbugs of the Waterloo Aquatics Racing Team. The Waterbugs – comprised of backstroke specialist Lindeman Farnhauser, breaststroker Chavis Rodriguez and the interchangeable flyer-freestyler twins, Rick and Dick Postlewaite – have always been something of a wild-card team in the league, prone to record-setting swims one week and flagrant DQs the next. Their own coach, Dorfy McDufferman, has described the team thusly: “One half of this relay is medicated and the other half should be.”

Also challenging for the title might be the Sea Stars of the Southwest Swim and Racquet Club. The Sea Stars are a new team in the league this year, having voluntarily moved over from the country-club league. The Southwest Swim and Racquet Club itself went bankrupt in January but the swim team has continued to practice, using the Pfeiffer-Newton family’s backyard 50-meter pool as its home facility. The Pfeiffer-Newtons’ son Tanqueray is the team’s anchor. While some in the league question whether the young man, who is already shaving hair off many different parts of his body, is actually 10 years old, the threat of legal action from his parents has convinced the league to allow him to compete in this age group. Pfeiffer-Newton is joined on the relay by backstroker Kirk Sphincter-Howland, breaststroker Stansbury Thurman-Dobbs and butterflyer Ashley Hinker-Wheaterman.

Despite the fact that both the Waterbugs and the Sea Stars look better on paper, we’re going to have to stick with the Killer Sharks and pick them to win this year’s title. They have proven, time and again, they have the stubbornness to keep their strokes legal and the slow reaction time to prevent false starts.

Decisions, Decisions

2009-06-28T08:00:00.003-04:00

It’s that time of the year when swim parents face some serious choices: concession stand or event timing, split recording or raffle ticket shilling, ribbon writing or hiding in the bathroom so the volunteer coordinator doesn’t find you and make you wait out front for the pizza delivery guy. Summer-league swimming is a machine that runs on volunteerism, and the sooner you figure out what you can tolerate, the more sane you’re likely to be by the end of the meet.

In the past, I’ve usually volunteered to write up what gets posted on the team’s Web site (schedules, directions to meets, meet summaries, and step-by-step instructions for how to put a swim cap on for all our newbie parents). This year I decided to take a break from the writing (due in no small part to the fact that we’re avoiding too much contact with one of the summer coaches who stiffed us $419 in USS team tuition – long, sordid story there). So instead I’m concession-standing it. I’d like to think I’m helping the team every time I talk a kid out of that second chili dog, 10 minutes before his or her next swim.

Mr. Coach usually gets commandeered to run the timing system at home meets which only makes sense since he’s the only one who really understands how it works, though he’s been trying to train other people so he can see Little Mr. Coach swim occasionally.

Neither one of us volunteers for backup timing duties because we know what a few hours of standing on a concrete pool deck will do to your legs. Nothing good, I can tell you. Likewise with running the cards on which the event hand-times are jotted down, back and forth to the folks working the timing system console. One mom who swam competitively often volunteers to be a stroke judge, but she rarely DQs anyone, least of all her own flutter-kicking butterflyer child. And then there are always the parents who volunteer to do backup timing but only for the lanes their kids are swimming in. But that’s why there’s at least two adults working each lane.

Yes, summer-league volunteering is a carefully choreographed dance of mixed motivations and even more mixed results. Yet somehow in the end it all works and, of course, the kids never realize how much work goes into making their meets happen.

Movin' On

2009-06-21T08:00:00.002-04:00

Most people probably assume that a coach would rather die than see a single athlete give up the sport that he or she coaches. Not true. There’s a natural lifespan to most athletic careers. Of course some have a very long lifespan. Take U.S. swimmer Yoshi Oyakawa, the 1952 Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter backstroke. Just this past March, after aging up to the 75-79 age group, he swam the 50-yard backstroke in 33.37 seconds. If I didn’t have such good self esteem, hearing that would make me want to quit swimming and take up golf. He’s unbelievable.

A more normal competitive lifespan sees athletes through age-group, then high school and maybe even college and beyond with the competitions. But not always. Sometimes the lifespan is shorter, but you always hope that the primary reason someone decides to move on from a particular sport is because they found something else that excited them more in life. Take our daughter, for example. Blessed with equal dollops of talent for swimming and ballet, we knew she’d eventually have to make a choice as to which one she’d pursue. Little Miss Coach was a very good backstroker as a youngster. After one particularly good meet, when she sliced her way down a 50-meter pool into the 10-and-under national rankings that year, I said to her, “Holy cow, honey, what did you do different this time that it looked so fast?” She grinned and said, “I did it to the Radetzky March.”

That’s when we realized her days in swimming were numbered. (Even better was when I told one of her ballet teachers about her humming Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March to herself during that race, and he replied, “Well, yes, of course. She was harnessing her creative energy to resolve the challenge she had been presented with.” Seriously, that is exactly what he said. When she complains now about some of the fluffernutters teaching and directing her, I just hum the Radetzky March.)

Sometimes college athletes take a break, maybe for studies abroad or to act in a university play. Sometimes they return to swimming, but often they simply move on. Fortunately, though, they move on with happy memories of their time in the sport. And they probably still get in the pool every now and then.

What you don’t want to see are the kids who give it up because they burned out and now hate the sport. Usually when you encounter athletes like that, there’s a rabid adult right behind them – either a parent or a coach -- who made them feel like a failure for not achieving specific goals. And it’s not just limited to swimming either. We’ve seen this kind of self-loathing, adult-induced burnout in all kinds of sports, ballet and music. You want to take all the fun and future out of an activity for kids? Saddle them with adults’ ambitions on their way to those finish lines or curtain calls.

But if you want them to enjoy the journey, then step back and be amazed as they move on.

How the Deck Was Won

2009-06-14T08:00:00.002-04:00

As we head into the outdoor swim season now, parents find themselves challenged with a fundamental shift in the viewing situation. With indoor swimming, there is usually tiered seating in stands, so you’re able to get a decent view of the pool from just about anywhere in a natatorium. It might get a little uncomfortable if you’re sitting next to one of those Sunday New York Times toters (like me) but you’ll be able to see the pool (if you can just chill out and deal with the rustling paper, it’s not like I’m blocking your view).

Outdoor swim meets are like the Wild West – lawless, uncivilized and based entirely on the concept of squatter’s rights. If you’re the first one to park your chair on the deck next to the starting blocks, that view is yours -- until somebody else puts another chair in front of you. Doesn’t even matter if your chair happens to be of the wheelchair variety. I’ve seen people block out their own grandparents when there’s still an inch of deck space to be snagged.

I tend to utilize the in-and-out method of outdoor-swim-meet spectatorship myself, sort of like the nomadic Native Americans who moved to follow the animals they hunted. I place my chair as far from the meet as possible but where I’m still able to hear the P.A. system announce events. Then, when there’s an event I want to see, I walk over, scootch in where I’m least likely to encounter resistance, watch and then leave. But like the Native Americans, I have been displaced many times and I am a little bitter about it.

But many parents like to stake out turf and defend it to the death (or the end of the meet, whichever comes first). One way to make this work is to bring your entire extended family. There’s this one family in our summer league that always manages to snag the most primo viewing spot on the far side of the pool near the leisure-pool slide: It’s a narrow peninsula of space that defies turf warring. They get it by showing up early, armed with lawn chairs, food coolers and a fairly extensive record of involvement with the local court system.

And then others will employ the “if it’s covered with a towel, it’s mine” strategy (I’ve heard this is how Wyoming was settled.) This strategy is used in the tiny stands which seat about 27 people. The coaches have tried to place limits on just how many seats can be saved, but that rarely works because parents who have been coming to these meets for years do whatever they want. In my humble opinion, anyone who has not seen Wednesday night TV in July since Clinton’s first term has earned the right to park their carcasses wherever they want. It’s how the deck was won.

No, But Semi-Seriously, Folks...

2009-06-07T08:00:00.001-04:00

Because the response to news of the Channeling Peace Initiative has been so strong, I thought I at least owe Mr. Coach and his prospective English Channel-swimming athletes a full blog about their highly admirable endeavor. CliffsNotes’ version: American David and Pakistani Usman, who both swim for Mr. Coach’s college team, are going to do a relay swim across the English Channel in early August (check out the Channeling Peace Initiative Web site). It’s their way of saying, “See? We can all get along in this world if we just try a little harder.”

And by “try a little harder,” they mean “swim 21 miles through very cold salt water.” The rest of us just have to promise to stop killing each other.

It’s a very cool idea, though I’m not really sure how they came up with it. One day, Mr. Coach came home and said something like, “David and Usman are thinking of swimming the English Channel this summer as a show of support for the power of international friendship.” And I thought maybe he was hallucinating because he had ridden his bike for three hours that day, so I just got him his dinner a little faster.

But a few weeks after that, it started coming together with the fundraising and the publicity, and now, as the expression goes in peace-initiative circles, they are so screwed because they are really going to have to do this. And so is Mr. Coach, who will be getting in and out of the pilot boat to pace them. He’s been swimming with me to get in shape for it – and can I just say I do NOT appreciate his sprinting past me when he’s doing his pull-buoy laps (and, yes, you are sprinting).

But the Coach Family is nothing if not supportive of world peace and bridging the gap between cultures. Why, the photo that graces today’s blog is a perfect example of how much we have done to help Usman learn about American culture. You see, it was taken during the November of Usman’s freshman year. Mr. Coach, Usman and I were at the pool one day during Thanksgiving break. He was stranded there at school for the break (although I think he went to David’s for Thanksgiving dinner; I know we had him over for Christmas).

So there he was, doing his workout in Lane 3. And there I was in Lane 6 while Mr. Coach was on deck with our camera. It had already been quite an adjustment for Usman to get comfortable swimming with women, but he was getting there. And on that day, we really helped him “get there.”

I needed a photo of me doing a flip turn for our Christmas newsletter (obviously it’s not your average Christmas newsletter). So I would swim toward the wall, do a flip turn and Mr. Coach would try to snap a picture at the right time. You could just about hear poor Usman’s sphincter slamming shut every time Mr. Coach shouted, “Nope, you gotta keep your butt in the air longer! Let’s try it again, but slower!”

Well, eventually we got our shot and thankfully Usman didn’t quit the team or need psychotherapy. And he’s done a lot since then to educate us about his country and culture.

Now he and David are going to do a lot to educate us about the power of international friendship. I can think of easier ways they could accomplish that, but I doubt I could think of a better way.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned on F Hill

2009-05-31T08:00:00.003-04:00

As much as I enjoy swimming, and it has been my main sporting activity for about three years now, it’s still missing one thing and it always will – and that’s hills.

Now I do respect the fact that swimming mixes up the aerobic and anaerobic challenges with admirable intensity. The variety of workouts in swimming truly boggles the mind and has done much to improve my improvisational math skills. And all the little gadgets and toys – the kickboards and fins, the paddles and pull buoys and "cordz" – they’re great. But I have yet to encounter a swim workout or gadget that equals the experience of running a hill.

The late running philosopher and essayist George Sheehan got positively weepy about hills. In fact, I once used an excerpt of his most famous hill essay for a yearbook quote. It went something like this: "But then comes the Hill and I know I am made for more…I am fighting God. Fighting the limitations He gave me. Fighting the pain. Fighting the unfairness. Fighting all the evil in me and the world. And I will not give in. I will conquer this hill and I will conquer it alone.”

I have yet to meet a swim workout that can make me that spiritually loopy. Arguably I just haven’t tried hard enough, but when you think about it, a hill is a monster made up of uncontrollable external forces that a pool is not and never will be. Open-water swimming probably comes closest to equaling the hill-running experience, but swallowing lake or ocean water doesn’t make me feel as if I’m conquering evil. It just makes me feel like I’m going to puke.

For me, the defining hill of my life came in college. A couple miles out from campus, we had a half-mile-long hill we would run to and then do repeats up. The hill had the kind of grade that would literally make car engines grind as they drove up it. About two-thirds of the way up, it flattened for a couple of yards which would always trick our idiot legs and lungs into thinking it was over, but then it rose again, unleashing a devastating wave of lactic acid into our muscles.

We called this hill “F Hill” (and the “F” lent itself to a variety of interpretations). One of our team’s alumni (who made the Olympics twice and for a while held the world record in the 1,500-meter run) once ran up F Hill in a minute and 58 seconds. But the flip side to this is that he was clinically insane. He went for 10-mile morning runs and, as we used to say, 10 miles is not a morning run -- it’s a cry for help.

But I learned a lot about myself during those runs up F Hill. Because the hill also flattened a bit near the top, we called it one of those “it ain’t over til it’s over” hills -- which meant you had to keep going a little further in order to truly finish it: That was a lesson in seeing any task through to the end.

We also learned about the value of small gestures: As individualistic (some would say anti-social) as runners can be, we did support each other on F Hill. But we had to do it without words because we didn’t have the oxygen to spare. A gentle pat on the back pushed more people to the top than anything our coach screamed at us did.

And the “mental lockdown” mode we went into on F Hill is a state of mind I have summoned many times in my non-athletic life, including but not limited to: while giving birth, working at the newspaper until dawn covering presidential elections, waiting out a two-hour traffic jam, and listening to a grade-school concert band obliterate the finale to Brahm’s Symphony No. 1.

Yes indeed, all I really need to know I learned on F Hill.

The Off Season

2009-05-24T08:00:00.003-04:00

For the college swimmers, it’s now the Off Season, that hallowed time of year when waistlines explode and GPAs can implode.

Seriously, despite ALL the complaining ALL season long about the cramp that swimming puts into their academic schedule, the minute these kids get handed an extra 3-5 hours a day for the remainder of the semester (not counting nap time), Mr. Coach has found that some of them have problems staying academically motivated. More than one Dean’s List student has looked at that long, uninterrupted chunk of afternoon time and decided that it’s best spent in the company of Mr. Nintendo, rather than Mr. Organic Chemistry Textbook.

Time management is like a muscle that works best when it’s being exercised strenuously. You know how sometimes it feels harder to swim or run slowly than it does to go fast? Well, the Off Season is like a world-class sprinter who only needs to walk across the street now but gets confused, wanders straight into traffic, and ends up on the front grill of an ice cream delivery truck.

Thankfully these days Mr. Coach has a large group of highly committed geeks who beat up on any teammate who threatens to deflate the team GPA even one-tenth of a point (they’re also keeping close tabs on the visiting recruits and making sure that Mr. Coach isn’t letting anyone who’s brain dead into the Class of 2013).

At the same time, a couple of these geeks have decided they also need to cram a little more excitement into this year’s Off Season by swimming the English Channel.

“Oh, that Mrs. Coach,” you are chortling to yourself. “Always the kidder.”

No, I am not kidding. Two of the guys are preparing to swim the English Channel in relay fashion this summer. “W-W-Why?!” you ask. Well, you can go to their Web site and find out for yourself and maybe even get involved in the Channeling Peace Initiative. I’m still at the point where I’m trying to wrap my brain around the fact that even though neither one of them will do a 400 IM unless threatened with bodily harm, they want to swim the English Channel.

Oh, and guess who they’re taking to pace them? That’s right. Mr. Coach. He can get in and out of the water (into the pilot boat) and wear a wet suit (they can only wear Speedos and Crisco), but still. It’s the frickin’ English Channel. 21 miles wide and a pleasant 59 degrees Fahrenheit. If the hypothermia doesn’t get you, the oil tankers will. And then I’ll have to change the title on my blog to “The Mrs. Late Coach Chronicles.”

Anyway, there you have it: the Off Season. It’s the time of year when athletes and the ding-dongs who coach them lose control of their minds.

I'm a Dara, You're a Dara

2009-05-17T08:00:00.002-04:00

Dara Torres probably doesn’t realize it but one of the greatest achievements of her sports career to date isn’t something that will be recorded in the record books. It’s not even the medal haul she took home from Beijing (or Sydney or Barcelona, Seoul or Los Angeles). Heck, it’s not even the fact that she acquired her last three out of 12 career Olympic medals at the age of 41, and is now barreling on in 2009.

No, rather, it’s the fact that she has given women of a certain age a new nickname.

You see, back in the day, a lively gal over the age of 40 ran the risk of being called a “Mrs. Robinson” – a nickname that came courtesy of that classic 1967 film, “The Graduate,” where Anne Bancroft (at the real age of 36) played an aggressively attractive older woman intent on seducing a young Dustin Hoffman.

That nickname stuck for a long time until the rock band Fountains of Wayne came along in 2003 with the song “Stacy’s Mom,” which was a salute to, once again, the charms of an attractive older woman in good physical shape.

And then it just got ugly. Somewhere in the last several years, the lovely term “M.I.L.F.” was coined to describe attractively fit older women (Google it if you don’t know what that acronym stands for). I only know one woman in my 40+ age bracket who likes to be called a M.I.L.F. and she’s got a drinking problem.

Soon after that, women of a certain age got saddled with the term “cougar” when it was popularized by the competition reality TV show “Age of Love.” Cougars are, again, attractively fit but sexually avaricious older women.

Yeah, my friends and I definitely lose toenails to running and burp up pool water because we want to be called cougars, M.I.L.F.s, Stacy’s Moms and Mrs. Robinsons.

But then it happened. The first time came toward the end of the U.S. Olympic swim trials last summer. I was headed into the fieldhouse one day and a friendly college kid asked me, “Hey, Dara, you coming to swim?” His greeting caught me unaware, but I quickly smiled, held my head up a little higher and said, “Why, yes. Yes, I am, thank you.”

A few days after that, it happened again. Somebody at a kids’ swim meet, knowing that I swim, asked me, “Hey, Dara, how are the workouts going?” Since then, I have heard of other women – always of a certain age – being called “Daras” and always in the nicest possible way. It is definitely a nickname change we can all live with.

Oh, but Dara? Any time you feel like slacking off and letting those abdominal muscles go to seed, we won’t love you any less.

The Mother Mystique

2009-05-10T08:00:00.003-04:00

The role of the mother in sports-related genetics has gotten increasing amounts of attention from scientists in recent years.

Yes, obviously all athletes have mothers. And yes, the word is out that a lot of coaches look at the mothers if they want to know what kind of body an athlete might have when he or she has finished growing. That’s because scientific research has proven that all kinds of physical traits get passed on primarily through the mothers’ chromosomes. Let’s call it the “Mother Mystique.”

Specifically it’s something like the mom’s mitochondria determining how much bang for the buck a person gets when they exercise, but I’m a little fuzzy on the details because the last time I heard this lecture was during labor when Mr. Coach got to chatting with the nurses.

Note to other women: Do NOT bring a professor of exercise physiology into the delivery room. They’ll be all like, “Well, honey, the physiological reason you’re feeling pain in that region of your body right now is because your discombobular artery is pressing on your parapsychopelvic nerve but maybe if you try a little more biosystematic oxygenation....” At which point the wife of the professor of exercise physiology tells him to do something NC-17 with HIS parapsychodiscombobular whatever.

But there was also something in there about why Mr. Coach was sure the newest Coach family member (then in transit) would resemble his mother in the body department – i.e., longer, leaner, more sarcastic. And so far, he’s been right.

Little Mr. Coach is pretty much a carbon copy of his mother (but with a much bigger Pokemon card collection). Little Miss Coach is more of a mix of both parents’ bodies but does seem to be lengthening out like me, the older she gets. She also has transitioned from swimming into ballet, and I can tell you those people are even more fixated on the Mother Mystique than swim coaches are.

But a lot of mothers of prospective college recruits (and ballerinas) freak out, thinking their children will be penalized because Mom doesn’t fit her high-school jeans anymore. They shouldn’t. That’s because no matter what the effects of time or Twinkies, your underlying bone structure and body type will be readily apparent to any halfway decent coach. If you want to go on a diet or start exercising more, do it for you. Don’t do it for some dumb college coach.

In the meantime, if you’ve got a kid with a modicum of talent in any physical endeavor, do what any loving mother should do – never let the father forget who the kid gets it from.

The Numbersaholic

2009-05-03T08:00:00.003-04:00

For me, the hardest part about joining the swimming world has been the numbers. Now I’m as much a numbers freak as any kid who ever memorized 20 years of American League East baseball team starting lineups (oh, like you never did that). I also grew up with a subscription to “Track & Field News -- The Bible of the Sport” with its monthly pages and pages of results and rankings. In college, I added the UK’s “Athletics Weekly” to my reading list, which gave me even more numbers to digest. Yum!

But here’s the thing with those sports’ numbers: Each one generated a fairly manageable amount of data. With major-league baseball, there’s a relatively finite number of statistics that can be measured. And with track, you have two sets of numbers because of the two genders and, for a little while in my youth before metrics took over, I had to know the difference between, say, 440-yard and 400-meter times (about 0.3 seconds).

But no sport, I quickly learned after marrying into the swim world, is as well-quantified (some would say as obsessively quantified) as swimming is. You have six bajillion race distances in both yards and meters. You have pools that are either “short” or “long.” You have four different strokes and another that’s all-of-the-above. You’ve got age divisions that begin at Post-Fetal and don’t stop until Worm-Chow. Oh, and then you multiply ALL of this by two for gender. Unless you’re competing at a masters meet that included a regional Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans-Gendered championship, in which case there may have been more than two gender categories but I wasn’t about to ask. Not after what I saw in the locker room.

Anyway, my brain just about exploded the first time I sat down with the meet results from a simple college, co-ed dual meet. The whole way through the three-page printout I kept asking my husband, “Now was that a good time?” and “Was that fast?” And he’d give me these random answers like, “Just look at the third 50!” and “Yeah, except for where you can see he got stuck on the wall.”

It took me years to completely understand these college swim meet results. But by then, I had hatched a couple of baby swimmers and then it was back to the drawing board. My oldest child was 10 before I could look at one of her times and say, with some measure of confidence, “That was...very good, I think.”

But eventually I did become fluent in Swim Numbers. I got to the point where I could read a collegiate conference women’s 100-yard butterfly consolation finals like a dime-store novel. “Ooh, somebody didn’t rest all the way for this one.” “Not a whole lot of fast-twitch muscle fiber in Lane 3, is there?” And “Now that’s what I call a negative split.”

I felt fluent, that is, until the day Mr. Coach came home with the biggest meet printout I had ever seen. It was eight inches thick. At the time, we were living in Australia while Mr. Coach spent his sabbatical working for their Olympic training center (Mr. Coach is also a professor of exercise physiology, so he gets these breaks every seven years to go watch people somewhere else swim). He had been working on a project to record and analyze races swum at their just-completed Olympic Trials.

“It’s the numbers from Trials,” Mr. Coach said proudly. “Every race by every competitor is broken down by start-reaction time, stroke count, length of stroke, turn time, kick rate....”

It was like waving an open jug of moonshine in front of a fall-down drunk and saying, “You wanna little sip?”

Yup, my name is Mrs. Coach and I’m a numbersaholic.

Event Management 101

2009-04-26T08:00:00.002-04:00

I have a friend with a problem. Let’s call my friend “Emma” (because that is, in fact, her name).

Some people cope with life’s problems by eating salty snacks (OK, that would be me). Or they take steaming hot baths (again, me). Or they watch the opening credits of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” 27 times in a row, laughing hysterically every time the line “A moose once bit my sister” pops up in the subtitles (that would be Mr. Coach).

“Emma” copes with life’s problems by staging 5K fun-runs.

Not running in them. Putting them on, as in telling some charitable organization, “Hey! I know a great way to raise money!” and then going out, finding a 5K running course, getting sponsors, printing up t-shirts, collecting money and – this part is critical – calling me and asking me what I’m doing at 6 a.m. on (fill in the date).

That’s because, sometime early in our friendship, “Emma” figured out that most coaches’ spouses are born with an event-organization gene in them. Give us a spreadsheet, a Thermos full of coffee and a box of honey-dip glazed doughnuts, and we can herd people into performing feats of physical exertion – and make them thank us for it. I’m not proud to possess this ability, but I almost always use it for good and not evil purposes.

But I thought I was off the hook when “Emma” moved away almost two years ago. Her husband makes a living running universities and he found a new job at a new school (whose school colors, it should be noted, are much more flattering to “Emma” than our school’s, so I couldn’t blame her for letting him take the job).

But, no, “Emma” was not going to let a little something like 822 miles get in the way of 5K event management. She even managed to frame it in terms of her birthday.

“What are you doing on April 26th?” she called and asked me last month.

“No,” I said, “you cannot stage a 5K to raise funds for your own birthday.”

“It’s not for me!” she said chirpily. “It’s for…,” and she went on to detail some truly demented but creative scheme to raise money for a middle-school jazz band that involves people competing in “trios” and “quartets” in award categories named “Woodwind,” “Brass” and “Rhythm.” (Look, I’m only best friends with the woman. I don’t tell her how to seat her jazz bands.)

So, long story short here, today I am going to be somewhere in the New England tundra, relieving the local citizens of $10 a head ($25 per family). But it’s for a good cause: Come fall, when Mr. Coach’s swim team is planning to stage a fundraiser of some sort, “Emma” is going to have to travel here and return the favor. And I don’t care if her new university’s football team is storming the beaches of Normandy that weekend and a $15 million alumni donation hangs in the balance. She will be here if she wants me to keep enabling her little 5K addiction.

The Visual Contact Rule

2009-04-19T08:00:00.003-04:00

Mr. Coach has been a coach for a long time. We’re talking centuries now. But no matter how many years he coaches, no matter how fabulously his athletes do, he will never master the intricacies of the Visual Contact Rule. And why is that? Because he is not a mother. And never will be.

Let’s demonstrate the Visual Contact Rule with a factual anecdote.

Every summer, one or both of the Little Coaches compete on a park-league swim team. Every Wednesday evening during those summers, the Coach Family is headed somewhere within an hour’s drive to spend the next 4 to 5 hours on the perimeter of an outdoor pool, watching kids of all shapes, sizes and ages defy the rules of organized swimming.

On one such Wednesday evening, I had some work to finish up with the newspaper I write for, so Mr. Coach was in charge of getting 7-year-old Little Mr. Coach ready and transported to the meet site. I would meet them there later.

I arrived just as the team was finishing its pre-warmup meeting. Little Mr. Coach came over to where Mr. Coach had set up our lawn chairs, and proceeded to strip down for his warmup swim. And when I say “strip down,” I do mean “strip down.” Down went the sweat pants and then up went the sweat pants, and in between those two actions, approximately half the team found out that Little Mr. Coach is definitely a male.

I finished my sip of Gatorade, turned and looked at my husband.

“Where’s his suit?” I asked, screwing the cap back on the bottle.

“You said you had your suit on,” Mr. Coach said to our son.

“I think I forgot to put it on,” Little Mr. Coach whispered.

“He said he had it on,” my husband said to me. “I asked him if he had it on before we left.”

And there, for those of you who aren’t mothers and who aren’t nodding knowingly at this point, is the Visual Contact Rule in, if you will, a nutshell.

“Did you actually see the suit?” I said, more rhetorically than anything else because I knew what the answer was. No, my husband – the non-mother – had not made Visual Contact with the suit.

We scrambled at that point to find Little Mr. Coach a suit because his non-mother had also not made sure he had duplicates of everything (suits, goggles, caps, towels) in his swim bag (although he did have all his Yu-Gi-Oh cards, one fin, two bendy straws, half a candy cane, and a complete Mousetrap board game set).

The 12-year-old brother of a teammate lent us a pair of board shorts. You know how you see those pictures where track sprinters work out with a parachute attached to them, just to increase drag? Yeah, that image pretty much describes Little Mr. Coach’s meet that night.

But at least they couldn’t disqualify him for nudity.

(Instead they got him for swimming breaststroke on the butterfly leg of the medley relay. But it was an otherwise legal breaststroke.)

The Post-Season Plumping

2009-04-12T08:00:00.001-04:00

As a naturalized citizen and not a native in the swim world, there are plenty of things I’ve always found unusual about this culture. For example, the whole team cheer thing. I’m not sure there’s any other sport that devotes as much time and energy to composing and executing such elaborate screaming rituals. In track for example, you’d be lucky to get a “g’luck” out of a teammate on your way to the starting line at nationals. With swimming, a simple dual meet is going to yield a five-minute, 140-decibel group meditation on potato chips, strawberry jam and the necessity of achieving one’s athletic goals.

But of the many unusual characteristics of the swim world I have encountered, the one that still blows my mind is the post-season plumping. I don’t think I have ever seen so many perfectly healthy and athletically gifted individuals gain weight as fast as swimmers do once their season is over.

And we’re not talking good or necessary weight gain either. A few weeks after one season had ended, I came home from my daily swim and told my husband I had just seen one of his college kids show up to swim, too.

“Huh,” said my husband. “I wonder why he’s getting back in already. That’s not like him.”

“Well, it might have something to do with the fact that he looks like he’s about five months pregnant,” I said.

“Ahh,” Mr. Coach nodded. “Yeah, he gains it in the belly.”

With some of them, the weight gain goes right to the cheeks and jowls. With some, it goes all over, yielding a nice, doughy look. But with some, it goes right to the gut (there are often, but not always, fluid-consumption choices at play there.).

Mr. Coach has explained that the rapid weight gain has something to do with appetite lag. Swimmers really do consume an extraordinary number of calories when they’re in-season. I’d bet, if you did a statistical study, you’d find that most swimmers consume about the same number of calories per day as yards that they swim.

And when a swim season is done, it’s done. Swimmers don’t leave skid marks when they leave the natatorium for a few weeks (months, years or decades) of rest from swimming. But they do take the appetite with them unless they make a concerted effort to crank it down.

Or, as in the case of many male swimmers we have known, they maintain the caloric intake with diligence until they get to their winter training trip. That’s when the yards swum will exceed the calories consumed and then, just like crocuses in spring, their abdominal muscles once again emerge.

My Chlorinated Cousins

2009-04-05T08:00:00.002-04:00

At this point in my renewed blogging life on Blogspot, I need to give props to my cousin TJ who, in that spooky mode of communication that blood relatives have with each other, gave me the drop-kick I needed to move my blogging here. He’s a masters swimmer now in Colorado, having grown up with the sport in Pittsburgh and Chicago, and he’s been an enthusiastic supporter of my blogging.

His side of the family was the swimming side. Mine was the running and ball-sport side. I never got to see his side swim when they were competing in high school and college. I really wish I had. It might have prepared me a little better for married life.

But it’s ironic that TJ and I now connect because of swimming. One of my first fully formed memories of him involves a pool. But it doesn’t involve either him or me swimming in a pool. It involves him, as a preschooler, flinging a cat into a hotel pool.

Now, to be fair, he has maintained ever since then that he only wanted to see if the cat could swim. Which it did. But I can tell you it ran a heckuva lot better than it swam, once it got out of the pool.

That episode occurred during our families’ last visit to a lovely hotel near Bucks County, Penn., which our grandmother Meemo had selected for a family reunion. Not long after TJ heaved the hotel owner's cat into the pool, his sister Meg vomited split-pea soup all over the hotel’s dining room. And then the next day, after a wicked overnight thunderstorm, I sat on the hotel’s stone wall overlooking the Pennsylvania Canal and it crumbled beneath me.

A few years later, when one of our parents called to inquire about staging another family reunion there, we were told that the hotel no longer allowed visitors under the age of 13. I can’t imagine why.

Now my other swimming cousin is Mary Beth, TJ’s oldest sister. She swam in college before going on to become an emergency-room doctor and now a med-school professor. Knowing what I know now about swimming, I blame the sport for warping Mary Beth in ways that nearly put my daughter into psychotherapy.

It was about eight years ago that I got a call from one of my aunts, telling me to turn on the Discovery Channel at 8 p.m. because Mary Beth was going to be on it! So I let my then 7-year-old daughter, Little Miss Coach, stay up past her bedtime to watch Mary Beth on TV.

To watch Mary Beth get buried alive in a snow bank so she could test some fabulous invention that draws oxygen out of snow (using a converter tube built into a ski vest). Apparently her swimming background played a significant role in her getting the nod to go under the faux avalanche.

So, all of Mary Beth’s scientist buddies (and the television viewers) watched her on a closed-circuit feed from inside the snow bank to see how long she lasted before giving the signal to dig her out. Mary Beth lasted long enough to put my daughter into a fetal position, that’s how long she lasted. I don’t think Little Miss Coach has watched the Discovery Channel since then.

And I further think, having now met enough swimmers, I can understand why, to Mary Beth, getting buried alive in a snow bank would seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Just like, for TJ, flinging a cat into a pool also still seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have done. Testing the limits is just so typically “swimmer.”

Bringin' Home the Bacteria

2009-03-29T08:00:00.001-04:00

You can pretty much set your watch by it: At the end of most indoor swim seasons, coaches will succumb to disease.

I think it’s a let-down effect. After expending Herculean amounts of energy for the last seven months, the first day these coaches don’t spend more than 14 hours on a pool deck, all the germs that have been camped out on the rims of their body’s orifices attack at once. Within hours, they are coughing, wheezing, sneezing and demanding to know who used up all the ibuprofen.

Mr. Coach is no different except that his post-championship let-down effect usually goes bacterial within a week but then it still takes at least three days to convince him to go see the doctor. Who has the Zithromax prescription printed out and waiting before he even gets there. (I have said it before and I will say it again: How my husband’s bloodline survived the Middle Ages is a mystery to me. The dust mites alone should have wiped them all out, and yet somehow they survived and the pharmaceutical industry couldn’t be happier.)

The worst part is, if you’re not careful, a diseased coach is going to infect the rest of the family. Usually I plan ahead and make sure that I don’t get behind on sleep, I keep eating right and – this has become critical – I keep swimming through the period of time when the let-down effect is in full swing. I am convinced that a moderately reasonable swim regimen exposes me to just enough chlorine to kill germs but doesn’t wear down my own immune system.

This year, it didn’t work out that way. One day, I was doing my usual noontime swim, minding my own business. I was coming into the wall on the 50 of a pace 100 free and – KABLAM! – I hit something so hard my first thought was I had somehow stupidly hit the wall. I recoiled and stood up, reeling, and what to my crossed eyes should appear but some barge of a human being who had decided to swim across my lane at the exact moment I was about to flip turn.

Now I’m sure to most experienced swimmers, collisions are not an unfamiliar occurrence, especially if you’re used to sharing lanes. But I am 1) not an experienced swimmer and 2) really, really adept at keeping people out of my lane, even when noontime swim gets crowded (it’s all about not stopping, even if that means turning a 100 into a 1,000). Long story short, my collision with the Unapologetic Human Barge (I know, right?) kept me out of the water for a couple days because of the bloody nose and internal nostril swelling, and that was long enough to let down the defenses on my germ portals.

Yeah sure, I could have and should have just done kicking those two days, but I didn’t, OK. And then Mr. Coach got sick. And then I got sick. And then the kids got sick. And then we were all sick.

Sickness – it’s the exclamation point on the end of a long season’s sentence.

The Barbershop Blues

2009-03-22T08:00:00.002-04:00

Not too long ago, I took Little Mr. Coach to the barbershop. Mr. Coach had been promising to do it for ages, but somehow just never seemed to get around to it. And I knew exactly why.

The minute we walked in the door, the barber – a tall, imposing ex-Navy man named Bob – took one look at Little Mr. Coach’s blond hair and rolled his eyes. That was probably because he knows Little Mr. Coach was born with brown hair.

“It’s your favorite chlorine-damaged head of hair!” I said cheerily. Bob muttered something under his breath.

Little Mr. Coach climbed into the chair and Bob tried running a comb through the fine, shiny strands.

“There’s breakage,” he said.

“What’s that?” said Little Mr. Coach.

“It means I can break your hair off without even trying,” Bob replied. He tried combing it again but couldn’t.

“Oh, this is so damaged, it isn’t even hair anymore,” he said. “I don’t know how far down I’ll have to go.”

“Will I be bald?” Little Mr. Coach asked enthusiastically. Appearance-altering damage is pretty much everything a 10-year-old boy lives for.

“If it’s any consolation,” I told Bob, “my husband has a whole pool full of college guys whose hair is in much worse shape.”

That did not seem to console Bob.

“What if we shaved a circle in the back, you know like make it bald in the middle with hair around it?” Little Mr. Coach asked, again with great enthusiasm.

“No, dear,” I replied. “They stopped doing that in the 1500's.”

Bob worked stoically for a good 20 minutes, chiseling down the strands on Little Mr. Coach’s head until a decent length brush cut emerged.

“Conditioner,” Bob said when he was done. “Don’t even think about bringing him back unless he starts using conditioner because he won’t have anything left to cut.”

“Okey doke,” I said cheerfully and added a generous tip to the bill. Just like I always do.

Title X for Men

2009-03-15T08:00:00.002-04:00

(And now, for something completely different from the Fun Department)

MUNCIE, Indiana – The Man Institute today announced the results of an extensive study examining the effect of Title IX legislation on men’s sports – and the Institute says one of its findings is especially revealing.

The controversial piece of legislation, enacted in 1972, was part of a U.S. Congressional initiative to provide equal opportunities in sports for females. Since that time, arguably millions more females have been able to participate in sports, thanks primarily to increased funding for girls’ and women’s sports. However, one of the effects of Title IX legislation has been the gutting of many men’s sports, and Man Institute representatives say their study may have uncovered a reason for that.

"We have amassed quantitative proof," said Man Institute Executive Director Biff Winkershott at a press conference this morning, "that the men’s sports most affected are those in which men are clad in the most physically revealing and/or skin-tight outfits."

Winkershott went on to list the sports whose ranks, he said, have been stripped because of how academic institutions interpret Title IX’s mandates.

"Swimming," Winkershott said. "Gymnastics. Wrestling. Track. Diving. We are talking about every sport where men – and well-developed boys – have historically felt free to show that they are in fact men. Or on their way to becoming men."

Winkershott added, "These are not athletes who are hiding behind baggy shorts, loose-fitting jerseys and other types of bulky, form-altering attire. These are males who are not afraid to put it all out there. Whether this chilling effect is intentional or not, we cannot say, but certainly our research raises the possibility that apparel-based discrimination may be a factor with the shrinkage that has occurred in these sports’ numbers."

As a result, Winkershott said the Man Institute has drafted and is seeking Congressional sponsorship for a piece of legislation it has dubbed "Title X for Men."

The Man Institute’s legal analyst Harlan C. Trunkmeyer unveiled the proposed amendment to the Education Amendments of 1972 act.

"We are going to challenge the inherent prejudice head on," said Trunkmeyer, "and for that reason, we’ve chosen to word the legislation thusly:

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex-revealing apparel, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Winkershott added: "Every male athlete in this country needs to understand that he needs to start watching his own hind side because somebody else already is – and it’s somebody who doesn’t want the rest of the world seeing it."

Spouse Coaching, The Return of

2009-03-08T08:00:00.001-04:00

So, people ask – with some trepidation – how’s the swimming been going, Mrs. Coach?

Well, I reply, not half badly, thank you for asking. Mr. Coach and I have settled into a viable situation where he writes workouts for me and occasionally wanders through the pool area when I’m swimming to make sure I’m not violating any fundamental rules of the sport.

The workouts he writes keep me moving in a forward direction with my acquisition of both fitness and swimming competency. And Mr. Coach and I have agreed after intense negotiations (including but not limited to the continued availability of my sausage calzones) that what I need most for now is to "refine my feel for the water" and that’s just going to take a couple hundred thousand flip-turns. That’s because in many ways, I’m still the equivalent of an 8-year-old in the water but, as I like to remind Mr. Coach, that’s an 8-year-old with a full range of cooking skills.

So, as I was saying, most of the workouts that Mr. Coach writes for me are productive. Many of them involve coaxing me into doing more backstroke for more laps because, as we have discovered, I’m not bad at this stroke (Mr. Coach says I have "good natural body position in the water," but I know that’s just coach-speak for "doesn’t totally suck").

However, there occasionally pops up a workout which is not to my liking (and mind you, I am a woman whose motto during my track career was: "Go Anaerobic, Early and Often," so it’s not like I’m a wuss). These workouts fall into two categories. I call one of them the "Honey, Do We Need to Talk?" workout. These usually involve creatively varied sets with diminishing amounts of rest. Crossing the anaerobic threshold is fine. Anything where the line on the bottom of the pool starts talking to me is not.

(Although, to be fair, the only time that’s happened was during a race when I didn’t realize that Mr. Coach’s parting words "...and don’t breathe," were more of a suggestion than a mandate.)

The other type of objectionable workout is the one that ends with me getting a cramp in the arch of either foot. Toe cramps, I can handle. Arch cramps, no dice. So when that happens, Mr. Coach knows he’s got some serious choices ahead of him that night. Thin crust or original. Pepperoni or extra cheese. I call this category the "Get Your Own Damn Dinner" workout.

Which reminds me. Eating. The gargantuan appetite that goes with doing Mr. Coach’s workouts does not, in and of itself, bother me. I enjoy eating. I drink whole milk with impunity. My idea of heaven is a big bowl of Cheese Jax, a glass of pinot grigio and a new episode of "Top Chef." (Hootie!) But the greedy leap that my appetite took after I began swimming Mr. Coach’s workouts took even me by surprise.

"Why am I eating so much more now than when I ran?" I asked Mr. Coach one day.

"Well," he replied, "you burn more calories swimming because you’re biomechanically inefficient in the water."

Guess who made dinner that night.

(and here's the first blog about Spouse Coaching:
http://mrscoachchronicles.blogspot.com/2008/09/spouse-coaching.html)

A quick update

2009-03-06T10:35:00.002-05:00

Hey and hi and thanks to all who've visited the site this week. The response has been amazing and much appreciated.

In answer to a question I've gotten a few times, I'll be adding a new blog each Sunday morning. Just a little something fun to go along with reading your Sunday paper and gearing yourself up for the week to come.

Cheers and thanks again!

Earning the Perks

2009-03-01T08:00:00.002-05:00

Hopefully other coach families out there won’t mind if I dish on one of my favorite coach-family perks – having the keys to the pool. It’s not exactly a secret but it’s not exactly something that non-coach families love to hear about. Understandably so. When other families live at the mercy of the pool-scheduling gods, they don’t want to hear about me working out in lanes 3, 4, 5 and 6 if I feel like it.

But you know what? It makes up for a lot. Let me just give you one example of why having the keys to the pool is a perk you should never begrudge a coach family. That example would be my most recent New Year holiday.

This year, the Little Coaches and I didn’t travel down to Florida with the team. So, on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we bid Mr. Coach and his sun-hungry swimmers a cheery adieu as the bus headed out. Three hours later, I was reading in the living room when Little Miss Coach went sprinting past me to the bathroom. The sound of vomiting ensued.

"This better not be bulimia," I muttered as I headed up the stairs. Thankfully it was just a nasty 24-hour stomach flu that took another 24 hours to recover from. Little Miss Coach recovered and then, a day later, I came down with it. (Spectacularly, I might add.) Here’s where it gets a little poignant.

You see, most collegiate and many large-club coach families don’t live near family. That’s just the nature of the job: You go to where there is a job. And though the people in your community very often become your family, you still have to be very self-sufficient. The Coach Family has relied on the kindness of some amazing friends when kids have been born, new houses have been moved into, or the family patriarch ends up in the ER because his bike is a magnet for idiot truck drivers. But stuff that involves a toilet? Sorry – but that’s immediate-family territory.

So the Little Coaches and I hunkered down and got through it. As I was recovering, though, I found myself thinking, "Dang, that molar hurts." About 12 hours later, when I couldn’t see straight on account of the shooting pains in my head, I called my dentist – whom I found on a day cruise off the coast of South Carolina. The long-distance diagnosis was that a root canal was needed. But it couldn’t be done until the following Monday, three days later.

So I got through it all and I recovered with such admirable speed that by the time Mr. Coach returned home, he was able to insist that I didn’t look at all like I had lost and regained five pounds (the hard way) since he last saw me.

Yes, this year finally trumps the year that I spent six days snowed in with a 5-year-old, a 6-month-old and half a bottle of cooking sherry while Mr. Coach was, again, in that lovely land called Florida.

So do you get it now? Hearing that the Coach Family makes selfish use of the keys to the pool might make you seethe with jealousy, but we’ve earned it.

Oh yes, we have earned it.

The Schnipke Effect

2009-02-22T17:28:00.002-05:00

That’s not what Mr. Coach really calls it. What we’re going to call "The Schnipke Effect" here, in real life goes by the last name of the real swimmer who prompted its naming. (Schnipke is really a last name on a mailbox that I’ve run past many a time, and every time I run past it, I chuckle to myself and say "Schnipke." It’s just a fun name to say.)

Anyway, the Schnipke Effect was discovered back at the start of Mr. Coach’s collegiate head-coaching career. That first year he had a guy show up at the start of the season who had been a lacrosse player but, for his senior year, decided he wanted to "try swimming." Seeing as how he was about 6'3" and had the wingspan of a pterodactyl, Mr. Coach said, "Sure, let’s see what you got." A few laps later, he asked the guy – let’s just call him Sam Schnipke – if he ever swam much before. Sam said, "Not a lot, but my grandmother was a national champion in the backstroke." (He wasn’t kidding either. She really was.)

As it turned out, Sam was very fast, too – when he was actually in the water and moving in a forward direction. It was all the little stuff that kept Mr. Coach up nights.

For example, Sam’s starts. Let’s just say there are five-year-olds who get more distance off the blocks than he did.

Then there were Sam’s turns. I dubbed each one "a turn in five parts": It was like looking at a cartoon drawing of a flip turn, panel by panel.

And then there were Sam’s finishes. How he escaped traumatic brain injury because of his inability to judge where the wall was remains a mystery.

And yet, in between the starts, turns and finishes, Sam was fast. Insanely, blindingly fast. He narrowly missed qualifying for the NCAAs in the 100 free his one and only year of collegiate swimming. But he did get to go to The Show on a couple of relays.

Most of Sam’s success, Mr. Coach realized, was because he just didn’t know any better. See, that’s the fun thing about freshmen or first-year swimmers. Because they don’t know any better, you can often get more out of them than you can out of the hyper-experienced, hyper-analytical athletes who will hyper-think themselves into muscle lock. Sam didn’t know that a six-second drop in the 100 free was huge. He just knew that if his coach told him he could do it, then he could do it. And he did.

So ever since that one year of Sam Schnipke, Mr. Coach has waited and watched for the Schnipke Effect to happen again. Some years it happens and some years it doesn’t. But when it does, like when you get a freshman who drops 37 seconds off her lifetime best in the 500 free, Mr. Coach and I just look at each other, nod and say, "The Schnipke Effect."

Are They Human? Or Are They Swimmer?

2009-02-15T17:18:00.001-05:00

If you’ve ever lived with a cat and a dog, then you know that one of them eventually starts thinking and acting like it’s the other type of animal. And if you’ve ever lived with a cat and a dog, then you know it’s the dog that almost always loses this identity battle. Fido will start trying to move lighter and slinkier than he really is. He may even curl up on the couch with Tinkerbell. And if he’s really gullible, Fido will try jumping up on table tops and window sills. Even if he’s a 100-pound golden retriever with arthritic hips.

Swimmers often remind me of dogs that have been living in the company of cats for too long. They think they can move quickly on land, even nimbly, and they therefore persist in trying to move quickly and nimbly. They try to vault over starting blocks. They try to skip up and down bleacher steps. They try to skitter away after yanking a teammate’s swimsuit off him. They try.

I’m not sure whether the mental disconnect comes from being around non-swimmers who can walk without tripping, or if it comes from thinking that because they move quickly and nimbly through the water, they can also do so on land. Either way, like watching a dog that thinks he’s a cat, it’s a little strange. Funny, but strange.

And dangerous. In all the years that I have now known swimmers, I have got to say there are very few things left I have not known a swimmer to fall off of or into. Starting blocks, bleacher steps, pool gutters and guard ladders are just the obvious things. Chairs, tables, bookshelves, shrubbery and urinals are the less obvious things. Not a season goes by without somebody on Mr. Coach’s team getting stitches and having a really stupid story to go with them. He even had a set of identical twins who managed to get matching forehead gashes, several days apart and for completely different reasons. Seriously. (I got a little excited when the first one got his gash because it gave me a way to tell them apart. You can imagine my disappointment when Mr. Coach came home and told me the other one had just gotten a gash in the exact same place.)

And taper is probably when the stupidest stitch stories happen. It’s like the workouts drop just one lousy thousand yards in distance, and the entire breaststroke lane decides there’s never been a better time to brush up on their skateboarding skills.

And it’s not like it gets much better, even after their competitive careers are over. Exhibit A: Mr. Coach. Who was a college swimmer. A sprinter in fact. He now does triathlons. Every decade, whether he needs to or not, he and his bike go mano-a-mano with a moving vehicle. And guess who loses? Well, the last time it was Mr. Coach’s left collarbone and his bike frame which both ended up with hairline fractures, so he got a sweet new set of wheels out of the legal settlement.

But that’s not my point. My point is that swimmers are not cats. And you know what? They’re not even really dogs either. If anything, they’re fish and you don’t see fish riding bikes on ice, taking skateboards down the front railing of the library, or falling out of their closets. You just don’t.

25 Random Things I Have Learned about Swimming

2009-02-08T17:13:00.002-05:00

1. I’m pretty sure the reason I don’t need to use whitening tooth paste is because of the chemicals in the pool water.

2. I’m pretty sure the reason why Mr. Coach’s Max VO2 has dropped is because of the chemicals in the pool air.

3. A tough track workout makes you feel jack-hammered. A tough swimming workout makes you feel steam-rollered.

4. The lack of gravity-based pounding gives swimmers an undue sense of immortality.

5. There are more nerds and flakes per capita in swimming than in any other sport.

6. If you learn how to do the butterfly at a young age, it’s like riding a bike – you’ll never forget how. If you try to learn as an adult, it’ll be paint-by-numbers at best.

7. All the rule changes in breaststroke technique need to stop until I can do it.

8. Humming in order to learn how to not snork up water during a flip turn is an urban myth.

9. The wiggle-butt off the wall is the funnest thing about swimming.

10. Swimmers are more comfortable with nudity than they perhaps should be.

11. Being able to figure out splits in your head does not translate into marketable math skills.

12. You can’t completely zone out during a swim workout because then you lose track of where you are.

13. The day after doing yoga, you definitely take fewer strokes per lap.

14. Men cannot resist the urge to try and keep up with a woman.

15. A new swimsuit takes 10 years off how old you feel.

16. Yoshi is a freak of nature but we all respect and admire him for it because he clearly isn’t one of those "get a life" masters.

17. All 8-year-olds will tell you they’re going to the Olympics.

18. When their parents tell you the same thing, then you know the kid will be done with swimming by age 13.

19. Boys’ 8-and-under butterfly is comedy gold.

20. The best swim parents don’t know what their kids’ PRs are.

21. Some of the best swim parents are Australian: They won’t even cheer for their own kids in public because of TPS (Tall Poppy Syndrome: "tall poppies are made to be cut down").

22. Swimming will never get as much media attention (or the kind of media attention) it thinks it deserves.

23. But swim meets would definitely be more interesting for the inexperienced spectator if it borrowed some ideas from ice hockey – specifically, enforcers and relay power plays.

24. Swimmers who studied dance or the martial arts as kids generally take corrections better than those who didn’t.

25. It never gets easier to get in.

Coaching Girls vs. Boys, Round 2

2009-02-02T17:01:00.003-05:00

It’s time for more anecdotal evidence that girls and boys are different, especially when it comes to coaching a swim team.

Observation #1: Nicknames. If girls on a swim team give each other nicknames, they’re going to be cute permutations of the girls’ given names. "Hope" becomes "Hopi," "Ashley" becomes "Sassily," and "Kim" becomes "Kimba." When boys give each other nicknames, the names are going to be a reflection of a boy’s physical, mental or moral shortcomings.

There have been several standouts from all my years of swim-coach spousing. There was "Cakes," a name which had some murky connection to the guy’s hindquarters. Then there was "Weest" which is short for the French word "Egoiste" which came from a TV commercial popular at the time for a men’s cologne where a bunch of angry women are yelling "Egoiste!" out their apartment-building windows at a departing guy who apparently is a cad. This swimmer wasn’t so much a cad as he was just a very driven individual who would gripe at anyone who wasn’t training as hard as he thought they should – and that included senior citizens and small children.

My favorite nickname, though, has been "Crow" which is short for "Scarecrow" which came from the Wizard of Oz character who said, "If I only had a brain." But the truly scary thing is that all of the gentlemen upon whom these nicknames were bestowed will still answer to those nicknames when you see them at alumni events.

Observation #2: Displays of Team Spirit. If you need it committed to posterboard, then you’re going to need a girl. If you need it in day-glo colors and embellished with glitter glue, you are definitely going to need a girl. What you will get with boys, when it comes to displays of team spirit, are things that can only be shaved off or measured in decibels. That’s because boys stopped making posters of any kind somewhere around the fifth grade. They also don’t make adorable name-tags in the shape of dolphins or flip-flops for hotel-room doors and lockers. And if boys create any kind of a "Countdown to Conference" display, it’s going to be on a dry-erase board and its subject matter will be R- if not NC-17-rated.

Observation #3: The Details. Boys often show a blithe disregard for the details of daily living – like "eat more protein than sugar," "speed limits are not optional," and "if you don’t stop touching it, it will get infected." But when it comes to obsessing over details in the pool, boys are more apt to do this than girls. A girl might cry if you give her a set of 384 50s, IM order, but she’ll do it. A boy will do it but then he’s going to want to compare his splits from this time to the last time he did the set. A girl might look at another team’s roster just to see if there’s anybody she knows from high school or club swimming. A boy will have pulled up the roster, Googled all the names on it, downloaded his opponents’ times from wherever he can find meet results, and then prepared recommendations for a dual-meet line-up.

And Observation #4: Gift Giving. If girls are in charge of picking out a season-end gift for a coach, it will be something thoughtful like a gift certificate to a restaurant and they’ll include free babysitting. If boys are in charge, it’s going to be a homemade calendar with team pictures like the one above.

(Incidentally, here was Round One: http://mrscoachchronicles.blogspot.com/2008/08/coaching-girls-vs-boys.html)

A Modest Buoyancy Proposal

2009-01-25T16:57:00.002-05:00

While others debate the legality and morality of LZR and other new-technology suits, I have a more practical idea. I say who needs new technology when you can just go organic! Work with what you already have – your body! As long as you’re not planning to have children some day, the sky’s the limit!

For starters, let’s think creatively about the issue of buoyancy. Many athletes have the buoyancy of granite because of their low body-fat percentage. (Some people might call that "too skinny," but I personally prefer the term "adipose-challenged.")

So what do you do if you’re adipose-challenged and you want to improve your buoyancy but the blueseventies are on back order until 2010? Lipo-augmentation!

Lipo-augmentation is the reverse of liposuction, but this way, you put the float right where you need it and there is not an official in the world who’s going to go poking around to see what’s real and what’s added once it’s on the inside of you. Heck, if I could inject a pull buoy under each one of my butt cheeks, I would!

Furthermore, plastic surgeons would probably be willing to perform the procedure dirt cheap because the floundering economy has decimated their cosmetic-surgery revenues.

But why stop there? How about a little help for the genealogically challenged? You know who we’re talking about here – those poor athletes who, through no fault of their own, are not descended from Helga, the grape-stomping pride of the Rhine Valley with size 15EEEE feet (and mitts to match)? How wrong would it be to surgically widen those feet and hands? Maybe even get a little webbed-skin action going there between the digits? FINA would be hard-pressed to prove it’s wrong when you figure all we’re doing here is evening the playing field.

And besides, as long as you crank out a few records first, and the Amalgamated Surgeons Guild drops a few contributions in the right coffers, by the time everyone starts howling in protest, we'll be able to say, "Oh, that train already left the station, it's too late to bring it back."

Finally, who really needs their head to swim? Hydro-dynamically speaking, a skull can be a major drag through the water, not to mention the problems it causes when an athlete thinks he or she should think.

And if the entire head can’t be removed, perhaps some of it can be harvested for lipo-augmentation elsewhere in the body! After all, the fat heads of the swimming world deserve a chance, too!

Are You There, God? It’s Me in Last Place

2009-01-22T16:51:00.001-05:00

When I competed at track in college, I had a teammate who was very religious. Now I’ve been a church-goer all my life, so having a very religious teammate wasn’t, in and of itself, a big deal. Besides, the school I went to was a Catholic university, so a quick Sign-of-the-Cross before or after a race wasn’t unusual for anyone.

But this teammate was religious in a way that took that whole "Spread the Word" thing a little more seriously than most. Beth liked to hang out near the finish lines of races, hand out prayer cards and invite people to her Wednesday-night prayer meetings. But she didn’t hand the cards and invitations out to the runners who won. Beth was smart: She went after the folks who came in last, or close to it. That’s because she knew there’s nothing like getting your butt kicked hard to make a lifestyle change that doesn’t generate lactic acid seem more attractive.

Mr. Coach’s school is affiliated with the Methodist church, but they attract people of many different faiths to the school. I’ve modified more than one dinner menu for religious or philosophical reasons, and that’s cool. Food is a great way to learn more about how and why other people live their lives the way they do.

So Mr. Coach runs a swim team with plenty of room for spirituality on it. The only time he gets nervous, though, is when a kid suddenly discovers God (or any kind of Higher Power) in the middle of a season that hasn’t been going so well. It has been Mr. Coach’s experience that mid-season conversions rarely take – although if a kid is eating right, sleeping right, showing up for all the practices, getting good grades and then decides to start speaking in tongues, then that’s a spiritual awakening he can live with. But finding religion while short-cutting around the earthly obligations usually means somebody is just looking for the on-ramp to Miracle Highway.

Which reminds me of my fourth-grade teacher, Sister Caroline Mary. Before every test, Sister Caroline Mary would have our class repeat a prayer that she dictated to us.

"Dear God...," she said.

"Dear God...," my classmates and I repeated.

"I pray that I...,"

"I pray that I...,"

"Get what I deserve on this test."

Sister Caroline Mary would have made a great coach.

Past the Point of No Return

2009-01-14T16:49:00.001-05:00

There comes a point in many workouts beyond which the brain stops functioning but the mouth keeps going. Many people, in the throes of an anaerobic delirium, will start jibber-jabbering about all kinds of things.

Mr. Coach has one athlete right now who has earned himself the nickname of "Blackberry Pie." That’s because when his lactic-acid-to-blood ratio soars, he starts babbling about blackberry pie he once had on a trip to Arizona.

A lot of people talk about food when they reach this point in a workout. As a result, you can figure out which way they swing when it comes to food vices – sugar or salt. You don’t hear a lot about booze, though, thank goodness. The idea of alcohol just doesn’t appeal at that point.

Other people will veer in the direction of pop culture. They’ll hallucinate about hot actors, actresses, models and rock stars with whom they don’t have relationships but now imagine they do. Or they’ll start singing songs, usually badly. Random snippets of comedy routines or movie dialogue will pop out. My personal favorite is the Bill Cosby "Tonsils" routine which ends with the young protagonist gasping out, "Ice cream, we’re gonna eat ice cream," after surviving his tonsillectomy. To me, at this point, it makes perfect sense.

But, unfortunately, the direction that most "Point of No Return" babbling goes is straight into the intestines. It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in reverse: Once you’ve eliminated (as it were) higher-order thinking, all you’ve got left are basic body functions. Mr. Coach, when he was training a few times for marathons, delighted in coming home after a 20-miler and telling me about all the stupid poop jokes that he and his tenured-professor buddies had come up with. As soon as the extra oxygen left his system, he had to admit the jokes really weren’t that funny but after Mile 15, he insisted, they had been.

College athletes, trapped in a pool, aren’t much better. The stuff that passes (as it were) for humor at this point in a workout wouldn’t even make the grade on the worst possible Funny or Die video.

Some coaches, of course, will insist on silent focus and commitment to workout purpose. Their athletes, of course, just shift to nonverbal language – the crossed-eyes, the tongue-hanging-out and the head-cocked-to-one-side expressions of exaggerated exhaustion and, of course, the soundlessly eloquent obscene gesture under the water’s surface.

Once released from their coach’s clutches, they’ll uncork the babbling in the locker room where it continues all the way to the dinner table. And with a few thousand calories back in the system after dinner they’ll regain control of their minds and mouths – until the next day when they start the journey all over again.

Just Look at the Parents

2009-01-06T16:41:00.001-05:00

I can’t believe that no one else has noticed this, but I checked out the USA Swimming swimmer database and guess what? Neither one of the Obama kids is registered! OK, maybe they’ve just been doing summer park-league stuff so their results wouldn’t be showing up there, but if their parents haven’t gotten them in the water by now, then I think somebody needs to talk to them. Now.

Why? Well, just look at the parents! According to the dad’s Myspace page, he’s 6' 1.5" tall and he is clearly built like a butterflyer. Yes, we all know he’s into basketball because we’ve seen the pick-up game videos, but that guy has a wingspan and a half on him. And about 5 percent body fat. (Incidentally, I don’t care how you voted. Or even how I voted. This isn’t about politics. This is about swimming. Which, as we all know, is far more important.)

But speaking of more important, have you seen the mother? According to knowledgeable sources (on the Internet), SHE’s almost 5'11" and built like Dara Torres from the looks of it. Plus, according to those same sources, she’s got a 6' 6" brother. OK, so the brother’s into basketball, too. That just means the wrong coaches got to this family first. We’ve still got time on our side here. Plus a couple of other factors.

For one thing, basketball (along with most other sports) is a contact sport and that can’t be a good risk for the offspring of the leader of the free world. And while swim practice could be considered a contact sport, swim meets are not, so swimming would be a much safer sport for them to do. Even if their lane mates’ parents worked for the Bush administration.

And the relative safety of swimming should make life much easier for the Secret Service agents who will be assigned to protect these girls. Although seriously, wouldn’t you love to be there the first time another parent got all up in the coach’s grill because one of the Obama kids got her kid’s relay spot? Do you think the Secret Service agent would utilize one of those Mr. Spock death grips on the shoulder or just a stun gun on the crazy mom?

But back to the Obama girls and their genetic destiny. The bad news may be that they don’t yet have flip turns. The good news is they’re moving to a hot bed of swimming activity. And while everyone else has been fixated on which academic school the Obama girls will go to in Washington, D.C., the more important issue for the swimming community is which club should get them. The Potomac Valley Swimming LSC lists 38 clubs in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. By the start of the outdoor season, one of you better have those girls in the water.

And while you’re at it, see if you can slip the parents some info about masters swimming.

Ocean Miles

2008-12-15T16:26:00.002-05:00

I have never partaken of an ocean-mile swim. As described in a previous blog (this one -- http://mrscoachchronicles.blogspot.com/2008/09/spouse-coaching.html -- to be precise), I had to learn how to swim surrounded by jelly fish and horseshoe crabs, and that experience pretty much drained me of the desire to ever again do much open-water swimming.

Mr. Coach, who grew up in safe, sanitized and jelly-fish-free suburban pools, thinks that ocean miles are a hoot. In fact, every winter he convinces his college swimmers to try one in Ft. Lauderdale – just so he can kick their butts. Seriously. The guy’s edging closer to 50 with every breath and he still cleans up in the Ocean Mile derby. (Note to Mr. Coach’s freshmen: Just say no. All you end up doing is the fifty 50s workout in one of the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF) pools as a substitute.)

But every year, those silly freshmen fall for the pitch. Want to swim ONLY a mile this morning AND not have to worry about your form? Swim the Ocean Mile. Want to see manta rays floating beneath you, like butterflies in a meadow of seashells and golden sand? Swim the Ocean Mile. Want to take on your aging coach and see who’s in better shape? Swim the Ocean Mile!

As for those pesky little worries about the Portugese man-of-war jelly fish, fuggedaboutit! You only have to worry about them if there’s a wind out of the southeast and then they cancel the swim (although you may want to ask Whitney about that).

But here’s the thing about Mr. Coach and open-water swims that any freshman might want to know: Yeah, he seems all mild-mannered gentlemanly and everything, but when he swims one of these things, he goes to his schizophrenic-psycho place and it’s not pretty. Once, after watching my husband slice his way through an open-water swim in a triathlon, I asked him how he did it and he replied, "Oh, all you do is grab ‘em by the ankle, pull ‘em under and swim over. You’re really doing them a favor." I stared at him and mumbled, "It’s like I don’t know even know you."

And yet every year, he convinces his student-athletes to join him in this folly. One year, I walked along the shoreline, watching them do it. The team had come down to Ft. Lauderdale too late that year for the official city-sponsored competition, so they staged their own. For God only knows what reason, some of the girls decided, after starting, to swim out to the international shipping lanes and then parallel the shore. Maybe they thought the water would be calmer out there. Anyway, a lifeguard who saw this completely flipped out and went all authority-figure on me, as I trudged along carrying everyone’s hotel-room keys and asthma inhalers.

"They shouldn’t be out that far!" he shrieked at me. "They need to get back in closer to shore!"

I looked at the guy, but didn’t break stride.

"Number one," I told him, "I don’t do rescue missions. That’s your job. And number two, I hate open-water swimming. That’s my issue from childhood. I own it, but that’s not going to change anything right now."

So we split the difference. The lifeguard trudged along with me and when the team made it out of the water, he yelled at Mr. Coach. Who was too far ahead of his student-athletes to realize that a handful of them had swum to the Azores and back.

"Well," Mr. Coach grinned and told the livid lifeguard, "I’ll bet they never do that again."

(Remember, freshmen: That’s the fifty 50s workout in one of the safe, sanitized and Mr.-Coach-free ISHOF pools.)

Final Exams

2008-12-08T16:23:00.002-05:00

We have now hit the time of year best characterized by the phrase "mens insana in corpore sano." (For those of you keeping score in English, that’s Latin for "an unsound mind in a sound body.")

You see there is nothing that is more of a momentum stopper in a college swim season than final exams. In fact, I suspect that most college coaches would rather face an entire team with microscopic flu germs spewing out every orifice than even one pre-med major with AN ANATOMY FINAL ON TUESDAY, AN ORGANIC CHEM FINAL ON WEDNESDAY AND, OH MY GAWD, A 15-PAGE PAPER ON ECONOMIC TURMOIL IN CENTRAL EUROPE DURING THE GORBACHEV ERA DUE ON FRIDAY MORNING. You can send a sick kid home to bed. The only thing you can do with an hysterical Academic All-American is shoot him.

Keeping kids swimming through finals is as much an art as a science, not unlike a taper. To do this, Mr. Coach employs a variety of tools. One is the Ziploc workout. He actually got the idea for this from a high-school swimmer he once coached: She used to occasionally show up for workouts with a gallon-size Ziploc baggie and a sheaf of notes she needed to study. The notes went in the Ziploc and, during kick sets, she studied. (No small surprise, she ended up going to – and swimming for – the Air Force Academy and is now working for a branch of the government which, if we identified it or her, we’d have to send you a virus to kill your computer.) Nowadays, Mr. Coach will occasionally throw a Ziploc workout at his swimmers, just to calm their study-hungry nerves.

Seeing as how it’s also the holiday time of the year in December, Mr. Coach also will attempt to distract his athletes with holiday-themed workouts. You’ve got your "12 Lanes of Christmas Kicking," your "8 Rounds of Hanukkah Drills," your "7 Sets of Kwanzaa Descends," or the "Eid al-Fitr Mile for Time" (when Ramadan falls in December). He also plugs in a few strings of festive lights and decorates a battered, 3-foot-tall, fake-pine tree with abandoned and broken goggles.

But, for the most part, final-exam time is just maintenance time. Time to maintain swimming, maintain good health, maintain academic eligibility and, most importantly, maintain that tenuous grip on sanity. So Mr. Coach keeps them in shape – both physically and mentally – by simply keeping them in the water.

And, when all else fails, he just hands out candy canes.

Giving It 95 Percent

2008-12-01T16:20:00.001-05:00

As I venture into more masters’ swim meets, I have come up with a race strategy unlike any I have ever utilized in my athletic life – to give it 95 percent. And so far, it’s working.

Mr. Coach understands and endorses this strategy. As he so helpfully expressed it when I presented him with my 95-Percent Strategy theory, "When you haven’t grown up doing something, it’s easy to try too hard. It takes 1-2 years for you to learn how to do something new correctly." (I restrained myself from pointing out that it only took me four hours to correctly get from childless to motherhood, but that’s mostly because that whole "voluntary versus involuntary muscle action" discussion would have been so 1993.)

Little Mr. Coach is not so supportive of the 95-Percent Strategy. The first time he heard me mention it, he stepped back (as if expecting the lightning bolt to arrive any second) and gasped, "WHY wouldn’t you give it 100 percent?!" (Mind you, this is the kid who, when I told him, "We just want you to have fun, honey, whether you come in first or last," snarled, "WHY would you want me to come in last?!" One of Little Mr. Coach’s other nicknames is "Mr. Literal.")

But Little Mr. Coach has grown up swimming so he’s learned, without having to really think about it, how one doles out the adrenalin, endorphins and oxygen and comes up with a performance that is an honest reflection of one’s fitness level.

I dive in and it’s like a symphony goes off in my head. The treble line goes something like, "Was that too deep? Too shallow? Wiggle-butt, wiggle-butt, wiggle-butt, crap, I’m running out of air, where’s the surf–, crap, there’s the surface, smooth, rotate, smooth, rotate, keep it smooth, crap, there’s the wall, flip!" and so on. And the bass line just goes something like, "KICK! KICK! KICK!"

The goal of course is to get to the point where it’s all instinctual, where I can blank out and enter that lovely "out-of-body" state I so often enjoyed in track races, where I did know what the heck I was doing and was therefore able to forget what the heck I was doing and get 100 percent out of my body.

Until then, however, I’ll be giving it 95 percent and taking 100 percent of whatever I can get.

Swim Through It

2008-11-24T14:51:00.001-05:00

In most parts of the U.S., we have turned the corner on outdoor-allergy season and are now embarking upon the upper-respiratory infection season. Nowhere is this more evident than in a pool. Or, to be more precise, in a pool’s lockerroom where half the team is gacking up a lung before and after swim practice.

The lockerroom is where you can really see and hear who’s got what and how bad. In the pool itself, it all sort of smears together and one can only hope that chlorine is killing most of it.

Some of this onslaught of disease will be due to what coaches call the "Thanksgiving Effect." Kids head home from college in late November to commune with family and friends, then they return to campus, carrying all sorts of new germs. Mr. Coach used to schedule a mini-taper meet for that first weekend back after Thanksgiving break until he realized that all he was doing was transporting 45 different pathogens across three state lines and back. Now he does the trip the weekend before Thanksgiving and then washes his hands – literally and figuratively – of the team for a week.

Most athletes, it must be acknowledged, will try to swim through illness. After all, half of them are used to functioning with limited lung capacity because of asthma, and the other half can’t hear out their left ear because of the chronic infections. And most of them are used to avoiding antibiotics as long as possible because they know that 10 days of amoxicillin has about the same effect on one’s swimming as donating a gallon of blood does, plus it makes you more susceptible to sun poisoning in Florida.

But there often comes a time when a coach has to step in and force a kid to go see the friendly folks at University Health Services. There’s bleary-eyed from pulling an all-nighter for an organic chem test, and then there’s bleary-eyed from the onset of mononucleosis. An experienced coach recognizes the difference. Usually it’s the inability to stay awake during kick sets.

An experienced coach also knows who can and can’t be believed when the symptoms for bronchitis, shingles or mad-cow disease seem to present themselves. Athletes would do well to remember this the next time a heart rate over 180 tempts them to feign cardiac arrest: You can pay now or you can pay later when you’ve got a goober geyser coming out your nose and 3,000 yards still to go.

Swim Parents: A Field Guide

2008-11-17T14:57:00.002-05:00

Just as there are different types of coaches and different types of swimmers, there are also different types of swim parents. And though you sometimes hear the expression "the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree" in the sports world to describe athletes and their parents, it has been my experience that, more often than not, apples do not fall from apple trees.

Oranges do. Kumquats even. Sometimes large inanimate objects that couldn’t get into the pool on time for warmups if their lives depended on it. And usually those are the ones who were birthed by a PTA president who runs her own Pilates studio and her husband, the guy who bikes 68 miles and then surgically repairs seven leaky mitral valves every day before lunch.

But even if there is no predictable correlation between athlete type and parent type, the fact remains that there are different parent types. So in no particular order of importance – and this list is by no means comprehensive – I give you:

1) The Aerobic Spectator: Have you ever found yourself watching a parent in the stands at a meet (and occasionally at a practice) and thought, "Wow, I wonder his (or her) heart rate is up to right now!" By the time this parent’s kid has finished a race, the parent is bathed in a fine sheen of sweat and panting like a St. Bernard on a summer day. All without taking a single step. For this parent, spectating IS the sport. And really, in today’s time-pressed, multi-tasking world, who are we to judge those who find a way to combine parenting and exercising?

2) The Linear Thinkers: The dead giveaway here is the electronic device used to record their athlete’s lap splits, race times, workout details and USS registration number. Where it gets a little freaky is if the laptop, Blackberry or other electronic device is being used to record other athletes’ splits, times, birth dates, heights, addresses and SAT scores. The former type of Linear Thinker can be cultivated to make a great meet director. The latter type is going to need a restraining order someday.

3) The Clueless Wonders: OK, this type is probably my favorite if only because it’s so much fun to sit next to at a meet. Basically, these are the parents whose recessive genes combined to create a freak that excels in a sport neither parent ever did. Their kid will decimate a meet record and they’ll turn to each other and say, "That was good, right?" And then they’ll ask you what the name of that stroke was again that their kid just did. They constantly confuse yards for meters. They fret about what all this swimming is doing to their kid’s cello technique. They always make dinner reservations for before a meet has ended. Ultimately, though, you can’t help but love parents like these because for them it’s all fresh and new, and that helps keep it fresh and new for me.

Parlez-vous Chlorine?

2008-11-10T14:55:00.002-05:00

In my alternate existence as a newspaper reporter, part of my job is to gain a passable understanding of the language in each new world I encounter. Everything in life is its own little world with its own culture and language, whether it’s a 4-H club devoted to miniature horses (talk about control-freak moms), people who collect Christmas nativity scenes (a surprisingly humorless bunch), or clinical anatomists (you do NOT want to know where med-school skeletons come from). When you’re a visitor to these worlds, figuring out the language is half the fun. But then, once you’re done visiting, you can forget the language.

When you’re actually living in a new world, though, you have to learn and retain the new language. When I emigrated to the swim world 17 years ago, I was like a mail-order bride, clinging to my big new American husband and relying on him to translate everything for me. A minute, for example, was no longer "a minute": It was "one-double-oh." The number 12 on a clock became "the top" and 6 was "the bottom." Feet turned into "fins" and hands were now "paddles." Somewhere between land and water, the mile lost 110 yards.

After one of the first swim meets I ever attended, I asked my husband for his take on how one particular race had gone and he replied, "Well, Siegfried took it out like a shot. He was all legs but then he started spinning his wheels, got hung up on the wall and died like a fart." I looked at him with tears in my eyes and whispered, "I have no idea what you just said."

My fluency in swim language has improved over time, but there are still moments when the language barriers pop up and, while not meaning to pass judgment on swim language, I do. The first time Mr. Coach told me that some fine young swimmer had "a lot going on under the water," I stared at him and gasped, "That’s disgusting!"

Similarly I remain confused that it’s considered bad form to "come up breathing." A kid does a flip turn, pushes off the wall and then takes a breath. Speaking strictly as a mother here, I am always hopeful that my children will come up for air when they swim, but Mr. Coach’s standards for oxygen intake apparently aren’t quite as high as mine.

So, while I understand swim language well enough now to know what is being communicated here, I remain unconvinced that to "come up breathing" is bad and that to have "a lot going on under the water" is something you want to be a flack about and drop yourself a bouquet – as we say in the journo biz.

The Playlist

2008-11-03T14:53:00.002-05:00

A couple of years ago, when it became clear that my switch from running to swimming was going to stick, Mr. Coach and the little Coaches got me a swimming-related Mother’s Day gift – one of those in-water music players, a Finis SwiMP3, to be specific. My yardage doubled overnight.

My SwiMP3, the first model available, was a clunky-looking thing with big earpiece flaps and a control module that sat on the back of my head. I looked like I was part of a medical experiment. As a result, I never failed to get a lane to myself. The second and current model is much smaller and doesn’t scare off as many Zippy the Two-Lane-Wide Breaststroking Pinheads as I wish it would.

My playlist is a constantly evolving work-in-progress, but I have come to rely on a few rules of thumb:

1) AC/DC’s "Thunderstruck" is not a good warmup tune. I find that my vital signs in water are way more susceptible to musical influence than they ever were while running, and you do not want to take the heart rate up over 160 on the first lap. So right now my warmup music is typified by slower, smoother but mildly upbeat stuff: Weezer’s "Island in the Sun" followed by Dan Fogelberg’s "Netherlands" (shut up, he was totally underrated), chased by the Tupac/Dr. Dre remix of "California Love." I had high hopes for that Ben Folds/Regina Spektor tune, "You Don’t Know Me," but decided its syncopated rhythm does funny things to my stroke cadence.

2) Kicking and disco go together. Sorry, but this is also true. The legs will and do respond to the fast 4/4 beat of a drum machine. R&B can be good, too. Hip Hop usually has too many tempo changes and some of the sampling, if other people can hear it, is going to...ooh, actually that might work to get them out of my lane. Never mind.

3) Songs that build to a stirring climax are great in theory but rarely work in swim reality, and there’s one simple reason for this – volume changes. The "white noise" of the water gives you a fairly small range of hearable volumes and you really can’t change the volume on these headsets while you’re swimming. So, while the Foo Fighters’ "Let It Die" would be the perfect tune to power you on a run up a mountain, in the pool you’re either going to swim in a sloshy silence for the first half of that song or else suffer hearing loss worse than your grandfather’s on the back half. Either way, you’re never going to get the full effect.

But the truth is I actually have been using my SwiMP3 less and less these days. I’ve gotten to the point where the tunes are becoming more of a distraction than an aid during the meat of a workout.

It’s kind of like that crossover moment in a track career where the newbie stops showing up in a color-coordinated Nike singlet and compression shorts with Oakley wraparound shades, and starts showing up in t-shirts almost as old as themselves, baggy shorts and a pair of imitation Ray-Bans.

It’s called progress. But unfortunately a crossover moment like this also means that I’m about to get my rest intervals cut.

Progress, yes, but not my favorite kind.

Barometer Kids

2008-10-27T12:55:00.002-04:00

Earlier this fall, Mr. Coach had to get the assistant coaches for the USS club that we manage certified. Part of the certification process is to pass a multiple-choice test with questions about a variety of "what if" situations that a coach might face. One of the questions he was telling me about involved what a coach would do if the air quality was really bad inside a natatorium. The point of his sharing was to say that the correct test answer was "stop the practice," while the real life answer was "open the doors and turn on the industrial fans."

But that begged a couple of questions from me.

"How would you know the air quality was bad enough?" I asked Mr. Coach. "Do you have some sort of instrument to measure air quality?"

"Oh no," he replied. "You just look at certain kids. Some of them start turning funny colors and other ones start reaching for their inhalers."

I was horrified.

"You mean they’re barometers then?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," he said. "We’ve also got a few whose shoulders can tell you when the weather’s about to change. Remember Erin from the college team? Her shoulders could tell us exactly 24 hours in advance when rain was coming."

"What about water quality, like when there’s too much chlorine?" I asked. "Do you have barometer kids for that or do you just wait for the swim suits to disintegrate?"

"Oh no," Mr. Coach said. "Anybody can tell that when their teeth start to buzz."

I suppose that being able to read barometers is one of the perks of experience in the swimming world. And if you want to get serious about this, there are plenty of other barometers to be found around a pool.

Eyeliner, for example. When a young teen starts showing up for practice looking like she took a black Sharpie marker to her inner rims, you know you’re in for a long bout of stormy weather. But there’s no telling whether she’ll emerge a cheerleader, a Goth or a sprinter.

Clean chins and scuffed-up bellies are another sign to look for. A few years ago, a bunch of the 8 & Under boys discovered that a wet tile pool deck is just like a Slip ‘n Slide. They would launch themselves head-first, belly-down and go whizzing by, like a parade of penguins, until they hit a dry patch and came to a belly-scraping halt. Some of them could do it without scraping their chins. What does this tell a coach? Easy – who’s swimming fly on the medley relay.

When Dad's a Coach

2008-10-20T12:52:00.001-04:00

People sometimes ask me how my children are affected by having a swim coach for a parent.

Well, for starters, I say, they don’t know any better so let’s not get them thinking they’ve been affected, OK?

Don’t all children have a revolving cast of 27 babysitters, each of whom is a Red Cross-certified lifeguard?

Don’t all children go to their first fraternity party at the age of six months and get used as "chick magnets"?

Don’t all children become the subject of semester-long Abnormal Psychology studies or have big toys called Vasa Trainers?

And don’t all children have more pictures of themselves with college swimmers than with their grandparents in the family photo album?

Of course not, but my children don’t need to know that.

The one effect most people assume is that my children started swimming early and often. Not a chance. First of all, neither Mr. Coach nor I had the cojones to drop our infants into the pool the way you see all those hard-core swimming parents doing. For one thing, that’s just...scary. For another thing, have you ever tried to coach an infant? You think freshmen are bad, try getting an 8-month-old to breathe on both sides.

No, the Coach Offspring started swimming when they were good and ready. Little Miss Coach started swimming when she was 5 and accompanied her father to a weekend-long outdoor meet with a kiddie pool on the side. By the end of the weekend, she had decided she wanted to swim, so she did. Little Mr. Coach started when he was 4 and wanted to keep up with his big sister. He spent a lot more time on the bottom of the pool than he did above water (still does), but he was having fun and getting air when he needed it, so it was all good.

Both children, however, started spending time on the pool deck long before they swam. For one thing, it was a good way to see their father. That January-to-March time period is a critical juncture in any swim-coach family’s life (I like to call it the "Single Parenthood Season"), so if the children were going to remain on a first-name basis with their father, they had to go to him at the pool.

One benefit of this arrangement is that each child started speaking in sentences rather early. One of Little Miss Coach’s first sentences was "Stwee lie aah kikov duh wah" (translation: "Streamline and kick off the wall"). One of Little Mr. Coach’s was "Stay in there!" (no translation necessary).

And these early attempts at communication provided us with valuable clues about our children’s personalities. Little Miss Coach is the more constructively instructive type, whereas Little Mr. Coach is...not. He’s a little more tell-it-like-it-is and don’t-even-think-about-sugar-coating-it.

When he was five years old, we met a young woman who had been a bronze medal Olympic swimmer. On the ride home later, my daughter said to her brother, "A bronze medal in the Olympics! Do you know what that means?" Little Mr. Coach looked at his sister and said, "Yeah. It means she didn’t win."

Hopefully that’s one effect that can be undone.

Swim Weddings

2008-10-13T12:51:00.001-04:00

I have figured out that normal people (i.e., people who aren’t swim coaches or married to them) go through three wedding-attendance cycles in their lives.

The first one comes right after college when a small but significant group of your friends decides they need to lock in early because they’re afraid their good luck will run out if they lose a hold of this one.

The next cycle starts about five years later and runs for another five, as the rest of your friends decide it’s time to trade in the happy-hour shot glasses for a lovely set of wine glasses from Crate & Barrel.

Then you’re in the clear for another 20 or so years until your friends’ kids (or your kids’ friends) start getting married at which point you’ll get seated at the tables in the back but expected to buy the most expensive items from the gift registry because you now have the income to do so.

Swim coaches (and their spouses) are different because they experience only one wedding-attendance cycle in their lives. It starts when they get their first coaching job and it doesn’t end until they die.

Every year, guaranteed, Mr. Coach and I (and sometimes even the little Coaches) get invited to anywhere from two to six weddings. And, we have discovered, this seems to be a phenomenon limited to coaches and not professors at our university, which only makes sense. A student rarely spends the kind of sustained "quality time" with a professor that generates a wedding invitation. (Although the university’s chaplain does get conscripted into service quite a lot and, so help me, if he doesn’t come up with a new sermon soon, I’m going to pull out my electronic Yahtzee game and start playing – with the sound on – the next time I am present for one of his weddings.)

But, mind you, I am NOT complaining about all the wedding invites. Weddings have proven to be a very efficient and enjoyable way to keep up with Mr. Coach’s former athletes, kind of like Facebook but with food and an open bar. Sometimes you run into people and your last memory of them may have involved court-ordered community service but now you find out they’re in med school, have an adoring spouse and they spent their last vacation building an irrigation system for a village in Albania – and no judge told them to do any of that! That’s a really beautiful encounter when it happens.

But it sucks that we can’t get to all of the weddings we’re invited to. This past weekend, one of my husband’s former athletes (and also former assistant coach) got married in New Mexico which would have been awesome to attend, but with Homecoming and the Alumni Meet on the same weekend, it just wasn’t happening – not that I’m saying Hope scheduled her nuptials to get out of relay duties at the Alumni Meet, but the timing does bear noting.

So, I hope that Hope and Dave had a fabulous wedding (I expect pictures by month’s end), as did Rebecca and Amanda earlier this year.

And then it’s on to the other cycle that never ends – the birth announcements.

Two Types of Coaches

2008-10-06T12:47:00.002-04:00

I believe there are two types of coaches. One type is the "screamer" who provides motivation for those who are unable or perhaps unwilling to provide it for themselves. The other type seems to be most effective in working with those athletes who don’t respond well to the motivation offered by the screamers. You could perhaps call this type of coach the "swimmer whisperer," if you want to be trendy, but in reality I just call this type the "non-screamer."

Mr. Coach is this latter type of coach. He is, after all, the type of person who, on the rare occasion that he uses a curse word, will use it by spelling it out (fortunately he has me as a resource if he ever needs to know how to pronounce one).

He also has only lost his temper once with his athletes and it’s a story that those who lived it tell to this day.

Once upon a time, some of the student-athletes he had swimming for him were on a 200-yard freestyle relay that was close to qualifying for nationals. Early on in the conference meet, they just missed the cut, so Mr. Coach decided to have them try again with a time-trial swim between the prelim and final sessions on the meet’s last day. The game plan was they’d go back to the hotel after prelims, get their rest and then return for time trials before finals began. Mr. Coach meanwhile was stuck at the pool all day because the never-ending heats of the mile also took place that day between prelims and finals. So he was relying on the student-athletes to get themselves back in time.

Well, as the expression goes in kindergarten, the relay members "made a bad choice" and decided not to return in time for the time trials. And, as they sauntered into the natatorium, they compounded the badness of their bad choice by laughing it off.

This is how Mr. Coach responded: He set down his clipboard, walked past the bad choice-makers, past the starting blocks, past the diving well, and over to the other side of the natatorium where, in full view of the team, he sat down on a bench. He said nothing. He did nothing. He simply sat.

The whole team watched him. At first they chattered excitedly about what he was going to do to the bad choice-makers when he returned. But the longer he sat, the less they had to say. By the time he stood up, about 15 minutes later, the team was grim and silent, and some of the freshmen were hyperventilating. By then also, the bad choice-makers had apologized to everyone, penned their wills on the backs of meet programs, called their parents to tell them they loved them, and then sat down to await their fates.

So Mr. Coach stood up from the bench where he had been sitting. He walked slowly past the diving well, past the starting blocks, and returned to his on-deck post where he picked up the clipboard he had set down. He consulted it to see who was swimming next, then took out his stopwatch to get the splits.

Later that day, the same quartet of bad choice-makers had to swim in the finals of the 400-yard freestyle relay, an event in which they were not close to making a national cut. But on that day, they did make the cut.

As Mr. Coach later recalled proudly, "They really pulled it out of their you-know-whats."

(I would have said the same thing – just a little differently.)

Spouse Coaching

2008-09-29T11:48:00.001-04:00

Every now and then, just to boost the excitement in our marriage, Mr. Coach likes to coach me. I am still new to the world of competent swimming – which is to be distinguished from the world of survival swimming which I experienced as a child in an East Coast town where there were no pools so I had to learn how to swim with the jelly fish and horseshoe crabs. As a result, I entered adulthood able to swim but with form best described as "paranoid."

However, a serious injury suffered a couple years ago brought my daily running regimen to a dramatic halt and after a couple of weeks of inactivity and realizing that I wasn’t going to channel my excess energy into something inane like housecleaning, I decided to finally embrace swimming. I also wanted to master a flip turn before the youngest of my children did because there is nothing more obnoxious than a seven-year-old who can flip turn better than his mother, the woman who gave him life itself.

So it’s been a long, slow building process. You would think, coming from a competitive track background, I would have the leg strength and lung capacity for swimming. You would think. In reality, this has not been the case. My shapely and supple calves are now pretty much vestigial, like an appendix or those little hairs on the tops of your toes. In other words, they’re useless.

And my desire to breathe whenever I want was initially a very serious impediment to progress. I would stop after a set of...something, and tell Mr. Coach, "I’m seeing little black dots and zingy things." And he’d say, "Well, don’t do that." And then I would say, "Yeah, I’m laughing on the inside." And he’d be all like, "Ha, ha. Now go again at the top." And then I’d say I never knew how much Mr. Coach wanted to be a widower because at the rate things were going, he would be in about 15 minutes.

See, here’s the other issue with how Mr. Coach coaches me – he coaches me completely differently than the athletes he doesn’t make babies with. Other athletes can dive in to do the fly, come up doing the breaststroke, stop about half way through for a breather and then finish upside down and feet first. They’ll climb out of the pool, come over to him for their critique and he’ll talk about the one thing they did right: "You know, Edna, I really liked the way you stepped up to the block there. That gives us something good to build on." And then Edna toddles off to the stands, feeling all empowered and glowing with positive self-esteem.

I rip double-digit amounts of seconds off my 100 free, I surface (seeing black dots and zingy things) and Mr. Coach says, "OK, that was good, but here’s what we’re going to do differently the next time...." And then Mr. Coach gets an earful about how much money he saved not having to pay for epidurals.

So Mr. Coach tries not to coach me too often. And that’s probably as it should be. At least for the sake of our marriage.

Kick-mania

2008-09-22T11:41:00.001-04:00

Kicking. There probably aren’t many swim teams left on the planet that don’t begin their season with copious amounts of kicking. And there probably isn’t a faster way to clear space in the lanes than to heave a couple hundred thousand yards of kicking at a team.

Mr. Coach’s team is currently in the full throes of Kick-mania (or "Thinning the Herd," as I sometimes calls it). You’ve got your sprint kick sets and your longer, anaerobic-threshold kick sets. Your kicking drill sets, your vertical kicking, your going-right-into, your intervals, descendings and your "I could be watching Oprah and eating chips and salsa right now but, no, I thought it would look good on my resume to swim all four years" kick sets. And then finally, you’ve got your "would you like cremation or a coffin with that coronary" kick sets. If a newbie makes it to this point, then you know they are in serious need of a social life.

I myself am still making peace with the whole kicking thing because I’m still emotionally scarred by how little (some would say "not at all") a lifetime of running had prepared me for swim kicking. Totally different muscles. Plus I have only recently mastered the "one-arm stroke, turn and push off the wall" maneuver, but I can only do it on one side.

I have, however, been toying with an ingenious turn maneuver: A few yards out from the wall, you dive under the kickboard, flip-turn off the wall, and then come up and resume kicking (with the kickboard) in the opposite direction. Ideally you would want to be using an ellipse-shaped kickboard (not that I have one, but if Mr. Coach ever let me use the power tools, I would. Seriously, it’s like you chew up 30 feet of crown molding with a compound miter saw ONCE and suddenly power tools are off limits.). Anyway, it’s an idea, although Mr. Coach says that such an ingenious turn maneuver would be cheating. On whom, I would like to know.

But it is fascinating to watch Mr. Coach’s team reconcile their fates to Kick-mania. The messages scrawled on the pool’s dry-erase boards are cute. Recently someone wrote: "We don’t like kicking." To which someone else responded, "But we do like long walks on the beach and romantic dinners over candlelight." It’s so cute when they start hallucinating.

As for the complaints, well, maybe the student-athletes just need to think of this as the problem-solving portion of the season. For those who don’t like falling asleep in class or while sitting on the toilet, think of Kick-mania as a natural remedy for insomnia. For those experiencing foot and leg cramps, try welcoming the cramps as bonus exercise for those ligaments and muscles. And for those who complain about the girth that kicking adds to their, ahem, hip-flexor region, well, that’s what God made cargo pants and baby-doll tops for.

And just remember – if you can survive this, you can probably survive the winter training trip.

Michael, SNL and the Future of the Sport

2008-09-12T11:35:00.001-04:00

Is anyone else out there nervous about Michael Phelps’s appearance tomorrow night on Saturday Night Live? Sure, he did a heap of good for the sport with all those gold medals, world records and overall good sportsmanship, but you realize of course he could destroy the entire sport tomorrow night.

Oh, no, you people read the Internet. You KNOW what some of those Internet haters are going to do to him (and us, by association) if he so much as flubs one line or flashes those famous bicuspids when he shouldn’t. It’ll be all, "Sure, Michael Phelps can swim faster than I can walk, but he can’t deliver a punch line to save himself! Ha, ha! Swimming sucks!"

Little age-groupers who started the school year with their heads held high and their little swimmer biceps on display are going to get to school on Monday and hear, "Michael can’t do a spit-take! Swimming sucks!"

The high schoolers, who finally grew in a crop of undamaged hair and got invited to the cheerleaders’ table to discuss the men’s 400 free relay over lunch, are going to find themselves exiled to the back table with the exchange students – from France.

The college coaches, who had been invited to sit next to the A.D. at department meetings and debate the merits of 25 yards or 50 meters if the school built a new pool, are going to arrive at Monday’s meeting and find averted gazes and stifled snickers. Except for the women’s golf coach who’s going to say something like, "It’s OK, even Eun-Hee Ji didn’t know how to cross to stage left and deliver a line into Camera 3 when she started out."

But, maybe, just like in that 100 fly, Michael can pull it off. Instead of gliding in, he’ll take that extra stroke and nail it. Yeah, maybe those writers can think up something as brilliant as that men’s synchronized swimming skit from...oh jeez, it was 1984, wasn’t it? That’s a long time between decent aquatic-humor sketches, isn’t it.

But, no, it’s going to be OK. It is. Probably.

Meet Chow

2008-09-08T11:31:00.002-04:00

Let’s face it: Bon Appetit magazine is never going to devote an issue to the food found at swim meets. But that doesn’t stop anyone from eating at swim meets, least of all me. However I have noticed that the further down the totem pole you go in meet size, the better the food gets. It’s almost like an incentive to never get a legal breaststroke.

Your national and international-level meets are probably the worst when it comes to what’s available at the concession stands. You’ve got your bloated, boiled hot dogs, your overly salty nacho chips with melted processed cheese food products, and maybe some bland, palm-sized, microwaved pizza. Big whoops. The coaches on the deck getting Dixie cups filled with fruit, veggies and ranch dip are doing way better than the folks up in the stands. And there’s only so many stale bagels that a person can eat in one weekend.

Of course, there were the Australian Olympic Swim Trials when we were living Down Under in 2004. On the walkway overlooking the competition pool in Sydney, a lineup of tents had been erected and two of them were serving beer and wine.

Beer and wine at a swim meet. You could stop right there and declare the Aussies the winners in the Meet Refreshments competition, but you’d still have to factor in their hot dogs.

I will probably understate this, but the Aussies’ hot dogs were the saddest, most indigestible excuse for food that I have ever tried to consume in my life. I’m not even sure there were any meat products in there, and if there were, I don’t want to know what part of what animal they were. No, the Aussie hot dogs completely negated any good will achieved by the chardonnay and Victoria Bitter. Not that I didn’t give the chardonnay a fighting chance, but all the vineyards and breweries in Australia put together couldn’t erase the sense memory of those corpulent tubes of tastebud death.

But there is one place where the swim meet food is going to be good, sometimes even inspired. And that’s on a July weeknight at a dual meet in a 25-yard pool where at least half the 8 & Under age group is going to be disqualified for inventing a new stroke. And the reason you will find the best food in the swim world at these meets can be summed up in one word: crockpots.

Whether it’s Pete O’Halloran’s Pulled Pork, Lori Hepplewhite’s Tostados or Jenn Zuweski’s grandmother’s Baked Beans, when you’ve got crockpots bubbling away at a swim meet, life is worth living. It doesn’t matter if little Hortense finished the butterfly with her face and now needs extensive amounts of reconstructive orthodontia. Or if Elgar invented a new stroke – the flutterfly – which got the relay disqualified and lost the meet for the team. Chow down on a couple of Marcy Schittzlebaum’s Sloppy Joes and all is right with the world.

Unless of course you have a fascistic local-government regime – like the one in our hometown – where the health department has banned home-cooked food at events on city-owned property because they claim the risk of "food-borne illness" is too great.

To which I say: "Dear Food Police, No self-respecting home cook is ever going to serve up a crockpot full of E. coli at a summer-league swim meet, because if they did, it doesn’t matter how fast their kid swims, they would have to move to another state, change their names and enroll their kid in ballroom dancing, that’s how humiliated they would be. So, nope, not gonna happen. Give us back our crockpots. Sincerely, Mrs. Coach"

Swimming Rites of Passage

2008-09-01T11:17:00.008-04:00

(Or: Why Mothers Develop Nervous Tics)

Earlier this summer, I had to fetch Little Mr. Coach from a swim camp that he and his father attended. Mr. Coach was booked to coach all three sessions of the camp, but Little Mr. Coach had to return home early for his summer swim league championships.

So, after a brisk 10-hour drive, I arrived at the swim camp and headed for the campus natatorium where the last training session of the day was going on. Picture, if you will, this scene:

Me walking onto the pool deck just in time to see my son – my baby boy, the fruit of my womb, the only male of his generation in the extended Coach family – climbing the stairs to the top of the diving tower. Which he then jumped off, feet first, into the water which was 10 meters (or roughly 6 miles) below. And where was his father, you ask?

Herding more children up the stairs to the top of the diving tower.

Apparently, as I have since learned, it's a rite of passage in the swimming world for young people to hurl their bodies off towering structures into vats of water. Little Mr. Coach survived this rite of passage – though right before entering the water he unpointed his toes, so the soles of his feet were screaming at him for a couple hours afterwards.

But I should be grateful (and not just because I can still nurture the dream that my son will give me grandchildren some day). Apparently there is a variation on this rite of passage which involves nudity. I’ve been told, though I have not witnessed it myself, that during winter training trips college freshmen (and a few freshwomen) will perform this ritual without the benefit of clothing. I extend my heartfelt sympathy to the mothers of these ding dongs (especially if they fail to adequately protect their, you know, ding dongs).

Other rites of passage (which I would like to point out do NOT exist in the track world from whence I came): writing on each other with Sharpie markers (Mr. Coach tells the parents of new swimmers not to worry, the ink comes right off with a belt sander); letting your hair get fried from chlorine (because nothing says "Date me!" like hair that crumbles when you touch it); and shaving all the hair off one’s body before a big competition.

Mr. Coach was still in the habit of "shaving down" (though for triathlons) when I married him.

Yes, there is truly no moment more special in a new and potentially fragile marriage than the first time a husband asks his wife to shave his back for him. It’s a moment that ranks right up there in specialness with the moment when the wife realizes her leg hair grows back way faster than her husband’s.

So I can only hope that, by the time it comes time for Little Mr. Coach to get his back shaved, Adolph Kiefer and his wonderful associates will have invented something that, with one good zap, can blast the hair off an athlete’s body. Now THAT would be a rite of passage.

How to Be a Good Recruit

2008-08-25T10:19:00.001-04:00

Parents sometimes ask me what Mr. Coach looks for when he recruits a potential collegiate athlete. Talk about your loaded questions. But sometimes, depending on how manic the gleam is in those parents’ eyes, I will actually tell them.

1. The Ability to Fly Solo: I can still remember the day when Mr. Coach came home so excited about a visiting recruit he couldn’t stop grinning. "Are her times that good?" I asked him. "They’re very good," he replied, "but even better – she came alone." "What do you mean she came alone?" I asked him, knowing the girl was from the other side of the time zone. "I mean, she got on a plane by herself, she got here to campus by herself and she is visiting by herself," he cackled with glee. "Is she an orphan?" I said. "No," he shook his head, "she’s just mature."

And therein lies the glamorous allure of that particular recruit (who did indeed come to swim for Mr. Coach, did very well in school and sports, was a phenomenal babysitter and has kept in touch all these years and is probably reading this right now, knowing that I’m talking about her. Hi, Em!). She was mature enough to make a decision like this for herself. And her parents knew that.

Now, granted, you can’t blame parents for coming along on most recruit visits. Safety alone often makes that necessary. Plus if the parents know they’ll be paying for any portion of their child’s college education, they have every right to check out the money pit into which they’ll be shoveling the Benjamins.

But when Fauntleroy shows up with Mommy and Daddy, and then Mommy and Daddy do all the talking while Fauntleroy sits quietly in the corner, Mr. Coach knows exactly where Fauntleroy’s going to be during his first weekend at Money Pit U if he comes there. He’s going to be in the emergency room getting his stomach pumped because Fauntleroy’s first taste of freedom is going to come in a six-pack. Possibly two or three of them. So parents, either raise your kids to travel alone or let them do the talking when you visit.

2. A Big Oxygen Intake Unit: The big hands-and-feet thing is a given in the swimming world. Those are the paddles and fins. But, from years of careful observation, Mr. Coach has added another body part to his list of desirable traits in recruits: Big noses. Whether the larger-than-average size comes from length or width or distance off the face doesn’t matter. Most excellent athletes, no matter what the sport, seem to have larger-than-average honkers. (If you don’t believe me, just go look at the athlete photos on the NBC Olympics Web site.) So, moral to the recruiting story here – don’t get a nose job.

3. A Sense of Humor: Most swim coaches have a sense of humor (or think they do). So it helps if the athletes have a sense of humor, too, because they’re going to be captive to their coach’s dumb jokes if they come to swim for him or her. When recruiting, Mr. Coach may throw a line out from a Monty Python or Mel Brooks movie, just to see if the recruits respond. If they do, then that’s golden. If they don’t respond but their parents do, then there’s hope. So brush up on your classic comedy films. It can only improve the overall quality of your life.

Coaching Girls vs. Boys

2008-08-18T10:17:00.002-04:00

Because Mr. Coach coaches both men and women, people sometimes ask him (or me if I’m standing closer) which gender he prefers to coach. I say that, if Mr. Coach HAD to make a choice between the two, he might choose the female of the species and the reasons have nothing to do with anything sleazy. If you’ve seen one scantily clad female with overdeveloped trapezius muscles, you’ve seen them all.

It’s just that when you figure you spend 95 percent of your time with an athlete in practice and not meet situations, and one of those genders is a LOT easier to work with in practice situations, it only makes sense that you’d go with the practice-friendly species.

That’s not to say girls can’t be a chore to coach. For starters, girls cry. Usually it’s about stuff that has nothing to do with swimming. Relationship woes top the list of reasons to cry during practice, but so do intra-team personality conflicts, midterm exams, sick pets and the return of high-waisted pants. But, to their credit, girls will cry AND swim. They’re just more efficient that way. Mr. Coach also maintains that girls are fundamentally tougher and that’s very useful in practice situations.

Boys will bitch and moan and whine and complain and touch each other in inappropriate places during practice. They will not only pee in the water during practice, they will announce they just peed in the water during practice. And then when practice is over, they’ll bitch and moan and whine and complain all the way into the showers where they’ll drag chairs in, sit under the water for an hour, and continue to bitch and moan and whine and complain until the maintenance crew comes to Mr. Coach and tells him to get the boys out of the shower.

Now to be fair, in meet situations boys do seem to function more predictably than girls do, and Mr. Coach does appreciate that. And boys, if so moved by the spirit, will swim through a bulkhead if that’s what the team needs (girls would but, again to their credit, they know that heads don’t grow back).

I also feel compelled to add that girls are more readily available and responsible babysitters but boys do make for very interesting babysitters. One guy once built a small city out of Tinkertoys in our living room. It was so cool looking we left it up for two weeks. And guys’ Lego skills tend to be off the charts.

Once graduated, girls will stay in touch pretty frequently for the first five or so years, but then most of them will disappear into their new lives. The guys disappear at first and then reappear after about three years. And usually when they reappear, the first thing they do is apologize for everything they ever did to make Mr. Coach’s life difficult. It’s like clockwork, the way the guys reappear and apologize.

And then they’ll start bitching and moaning and whining and complaining about something new. In a way, it’s kind of comforting.

The Olympic Thank-You Torch

2008-08-11T10:14:00.001-04:00

Every day, Mr. Coach shows his gratitude to the athletes in his life by swimming the living snot out of them. Fortunately for him, they’re a lot kinder when they show him their gratitude.

Often, at season’s end, they show their gratitude with restaurant gift certificates (and free babysitting, always clutch). Once it was tickets for both of us to see a Broadway touring production of "Les Miserables" (if there was a subliminal message with that one, we’re ignoring it). Even after they graduate, Mr. Coach’s swimmers keep expressing gratitude for his having swum the living shot out of them. One gal, Kde, asked her wedding guests to donate money to her alma mater’s new pool in lieu of gifts. Seriously.

But, as I sit here right now in a hotel room, watching the opening ceremonies from the Beijing Olympics (the "fam" and I are in Indianapolis for a swim meet, but of course), I can’t help but remember one of the most unusual ways a swimmer expressed her gratitude for all the pain and suffering Mr. Coach inflicted upon her. (Interesting opening ceremonies, by the way, but Little Mr. Coach called it when he said those poor Hungarian women looked like they walked through a paintball game to get there.)

Molly’s expression of gratitude involved making Mr. Coach fly 2,260 miles, put on an outfit that made him look like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, then run a quarter-mile in single-digit winter weather through a dicey part of town. In other words, she successfully nominated him to carry the Olympic torch during the relay leading up to the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

Appropriately there was a swimming-related complication to the whole event. When Mr. Coach found out in fall 2001 that he had been chosen, he realized the date of the relay’s transit in the city where he was assigned to run it would fall smack-dab in the middle of his college team’s winter training trip in Fort Lauderdale. He hesitated for a moment until I gently pointed out he’d have to be missing a frontal lobe or two to turn down an honor like this.

So he drilled his assistant coach on the intricacies of keeping 40 college swimmers alive for 36 hours and then booked his round-trip tickets from and to Fort Lauderdale. Back home, I organized a caravan of friends and family to join us when Mr. Coach returned for the torch relay. And what a memorable relay it was.

After depositing Mr. Coach at the meeting spot for the relay participants, the caravan of family and friends set up camp at a pizza joint near where he was slated to do his leg of the relay. He would travel there in one of those buses like you see in airport parking lots.

It was a bitterly cold evening, so the parents sent the kids outside to occasionally see how close the news helicopter search lights were getting. Finally the advance vehicles started arriving. Highly perky young men and women jumped out of vans and began heaving bottles of soda into the crowd, beaning a few of the less observant spectators.

Before they knew it, the mini-bus with the relay participants showed up and out popped Mr. Coach, holding something that looked like a yard-long, saber-toothed tiger fang. A few minutes later a woman walking slowly and savoring every second of her time with the flame sauntered up to Mr. Coach, tipped her torch towards his, lighting it. And then he took off. Like a bat out of hell.

The caravan of family and friends and I looked at each other, slack-jawed because our plans to jog alongside Mr. Coach were disappearing rapidly into the winter darkness. One of my friends grabbed Little Mr. Coach, then a three-year-old, from me.

"Go, go!" he yelled, so I abandoned my son and took off after my husband, camera in hand. Alas, I did not reach him in time to get a picture (though he certainly got an earful from me later), but a pair of his college athlete’s parents had had the presence of mind to set up camp at his end point and they got some video of Mr. Coach sprinting in with his torch and passing the flame to the next participant. The rest of the caravan arrived a few minutes later and Mr. Coach, now done with his relay duties, walked back to the pizza joint with everyone, explaining why he taken the whole relay concept so literally.

"Before I got out of the bus," he said, "the organizers told me that they were running behind on time and they asked me if I could help them out, so I said, ‘Sure!’"

So now you know that when that Olympic torch got to Salt Lake City on time, Mr. Coach played a major role. And for that, his country undoubtedly owes him a big thank-you (though hopefully with free babysitting).

FOO: Friends of Officials

2008-08-04T19:13:00.002-04:00

One of the risks of being a swimmer in a swim-coach family is that your coaching parent is friends with the officials. Now most people might say, "Oh, but that’s great! Officials are the most powerful people at a swim meet! Knowing the officials must be a definite plus!"

You would think. But I vividly remember the first time my son, Little Mr. Coach, swam a 100-yard Individual Medley. Now, mind you, Little Mr. Coach was only six years old at the time so Mr. Coach’s and my expectations were not high. But he and all his 8 & Under buddies had decided they wanted to try 100 IMs. (If you have to ask why, you’ve obviously never had an 8 & Under Boy in your household. When they’re not daring each other to try 100 IMs, they’re either perfecting their armpit-farting technique or licking electric sockets. Sending them out to screw up a 100 IM is a fairly safe and socially acceptable use of their energies.)

So anyway, Little Mr. Coach swam his first 100 IM and you didn’t have to be a meet official to know his result that day wouldn’t count. But you did have to be a meet official to disqualify him. Five times. At least that’s what the jolly official who came over to Mr. Coach afterwards said.
"Yeah," the jolly official said to Mr. Coach between guffaws, "we deked him five times, but we would have deked him anyway just for being your kid."

That’s a choice example of what folks in the officiating biz call "Official Humor."

Little Miss Coach and Little Mr. Coach have also learned they can count on meet officials to remind them of their parentage. Officials will look at a heat sheet and notice the last name.

"Hey, you’re not Mr. Coach’s kid, are you?" they’ll say, pretending to be all menacing about it. In situations like these, Mr. Coach and I have advised our children to deploy the gays-in-the-military strategy: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

But, to be fair, there are some advantages to name recognition. A coach’s kid is rarely going to get lost in the crowd and end up in the wrong lane or heat. And the officials figured out pretty quickly that if Little Miss Coach got DQ’d for something, it was kinder to discreetly tell her dad and let him handle the soul-rending swell of tears from those big brown eyes. Officials aren’t made of stone, you know.

But Little Mr. Coach is proving to be payback for Official Humor because to officiate a race that he’s in means you better know your rule book inside and out.

Walking during a backstroke? That’s disqualifiable.

Coming to a complete stop in the water because he couldn’t remember if he was swimming a 50 or a 100? Not disqualifiable because he didn’t touch bottom and he kept facing forward before starting up again.

Hopping onto the blocks after a heat has started and diving in (and even finishing first) when he was slated for the next heat? Actually, he got them on that one. The official deked Little Mr. Coach for "delay of meet" but Mr. Coach didn’t protest. He’s sure it wasn’t a "delay of meet" offense but he has no idea what exactly it was.

Hey, friends know when to cut friends some slack.

A New Pool: better living through bulldozing

2008-07-28T18:34:00.003-04:00

There are no words more beautiful in a swim-coach family than these: a new pool.

Imbued with the sweet scent of hope that only a UV air-purification system can deliver and able to erase the memory of unidentifiable rashes like a diatomaceous-earth filter, a new pool is a harbinger of better things to come in any swim-coach family.

The swim-coach family will say to themselves, "This is going to be the year that Daddy finally kicks the Singulair habit." Or maybe they’ll say, "This is the year that the guys from the local OSHA office stop calling and asking if there’s anything they can do to help." Or perhaps, "This is the year that the microbiology class stops leaving petri dishes out to collect mold samples from the pool air." Bottom line, a new pool is cause for much rejoicing.

And now my family stands metaphorically perched on the metaphorical starting block of a literal new pool. Way back when Mr. Coach was hired, the university’s game plan had been to build a new pool in 3 to 5 years. Then economic reality hit and, like a seven-year-old in the 25-yard butterfly, the plans for a new pool have plummeted, surfaced and plummeted many times.

But this past year, somebody taught that seven-year-old how to get his hips into it and he finally touched the wall with both hands and the umpteen million dollars needed to get that pool built. My reaction when my husband told me (for the umpteenth time) that the new pool would get built? "I’ll believe it when I see it," I said. (I’m a little bitter about the Singulair bills.)

But earlier this summer, I began to see it. The architect’s plans were unveiled and a name for the new facility was announced. Trees were slaughtered and earth has been getting bulldozed around the new natatorium’s site, destroying the delicate micro-ecosystems where furry groundhogs have shuffled and snuffled for centuries and migrating songbirds have stopped to refresh themselves on thistle seeds and honeysuckle nectar. Soon, the lives of a half-dozen innocent tennis courts will be snuffed out.

And I couldn’t be happier. In fact, I’m thinking of throwing a party to celebrate this senseless carnage of nature and non-revenue-generating sports.

And while Mr. Coach works diligently to explain to the powers-that-be why starting blocks and lane lines are must-haves on his start-up costs list, I have been assembling my own list of must-haves: cushioned, ergonomically-correct seats in the stands (with cupholders), a timing-system control console that you don’t need an engineering degree to understand (for when the work-study students don’t show up and I have to help operate the timing system), refrigerated drink dispensers in the coach’s office, and a wood-fired pizza oven would be nice, too.

I would further request that the new facility get the rights to play a different version of the national anthem before meets, the version that I know Mr. Coach really wants to play: the Jimi Hendrix guitar solo – but it needs to be the studio version, not the live one from Woodstock. No one can accuse Mrs. Coach of being insensitive.

My World: and you're welcome to it!

2008-07-21T17:53:00.003-04:00

The first time I ever went to a swim meet was on my honeymoon. In Fort Lauderdale. As part of the annual Swim Coaches’ Forum, which has been held since like 1857 at the International Swimming Hall of Fame pool complex. And, oh yeah, I was staying in a hotel with about 30 college students and their coach, my new husband.

As I look back now on my decision to elope on Christmas Eve and spend the first couple weeks of married life with a bunch of chlorine-impaired, hormonally-charged, voraciously-hungry social degenerates whose idea of welcoming the New Year was to toss the coach’s new wife into an unheated outdoor hotel pool at midnight, I’m pretty sure there’s only one explanation for my decision – the lifetime supply of sex.

With Mr. Coach, for heaven’s sake, not the degenerates. Jeez.

Actually, anyone who knows me didn’t find my decision all that surprising because I’m a little on the pragmatic and frugal side (which is not a bad way to be as a coach’s spouse). Elopement was an appealing option because I don’t like ceremonies and I especially don’t like being the center of attention in ceremonies which have become little more than commercially-sanctioned excuses to soak lovesick saps for obscene amounts of money which could be better spent on things like food and shelter. (Your mileage may vary.)

And a trip to Florida in the middle of winter also was appealing. Though it would not technically fulfill all the standards for a honeymoon (24/7 privacy, to name one), it satisfied enough of them and I also liked the idea of immersing myself completely in this new world of swimming. It was the moral equivalent of jumping into the water without sticking your toe in first.

Amazingly, I have absolutely no regrets about beginning married life this way. Though I wasn’t a swimmer myself then, I had been a runner all my life, so the athletic life as lived on an academic calendar was not unknown to me. In fact, the idea of returning to a lifestyle built around the cyclical flow of training, tapering, racing and resting was comforting. And even though I was, at that point, seven years removed from my own days of college running, my instincts still told me that a year begins in September.

I also thought, coming from an individual-type sport, that the similarities between the track and swimming cultures would be comfortingly familiar – though I did have some vague recollection that the swimmers I had known at my college were, how shall one put it, a little less tightly wound than my track teammates.

I had no idea how different the two cultures were, but getting thrown into a pool (an unheated outdoor pool) at midnight on New Year’s Eve, seven days into married life, was probably a good glimpse into just how different those two cultures really are.

I now suspect it’s the pounding from running, the gravity effect if you will, that makes runners both more grounded and more uptight. For example, if a runner gets drunk, it’s because he or she decided that the 1.14 beers it would take to get drunk will fit into his or her training schedule at precisely 9:36 p.m. on a Saturday night, eight weeks out from the NCAA championships. If a swimmer gets drunk, it’s because it’s Thursday.

Now granted, I have since learned that many swimmers can be just as anal as runners and some of them don’t even drink beer, but most of them still take chances with their personal safety, no matter where on the ranking charts their times appear, and they do so in a manner which says, "It’s not a death wish. It’s a complete absence of any sense of mortality."

Which, let’s face it, would have to be the case if you toss your coach’s new wife into an unheated outdoor pool on New Year’s Eve.