To Breathe or Not to Breathe

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.

My Chlorinated Cousins

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.”

Parlez-vous Chlorine?

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.

Barometer Kids

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.