Event Management 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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."