Dwayne the Pool, Mama, I’m Dwowning!

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.]  

Are They Human? Or Are They Swimmer?

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.