The Hairless Wonders

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.

The Virtues of Slowing Down

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 Modest Buoyancy Proposal

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!