Everything You Ever Needed to Know about Mr. Coach…

…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

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

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.

Archie

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?

Navel Gazing on a Friday Afternoon

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.)

Ocean Miles

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.)

My World: and you're welcome to it!

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.