The Birthday Workout

I don’t know if other people are the same, but I put quite a bit of effort into planning my Birthday Workout.

This ritualistic homage to my own birth started when I was a high school runner. I decided that, since I was born at 6:33 p.m., I needed to be running at that exact moment every year on my birthday. And for many years I did just that -- until one day in my early 30s when I suffered a terrible realization. For all those years of birth-moment running, I had been living in the Eastern U.S. time zone – but I had been born in the Pacific U.S. time zone, which meant I had been running three hours too early every year. I should have been running at 9:33 p.m.

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out. As anyone who knows me will tell you, details like that don’t usually escape me because my brain is a graveyard for minutiae. Need to know the N.Y. Yankees’ starting lineup for the 1978 World Series? It’s in there. The middle names and birth dates of all my grade school classmates? Yup, they’re still in there, too, taking up space that could be better devoted to remembering when I last changed the oil in the car.

And yet, this detail had eluded me and that irked me to no end. My slavish devotion to the moment of my birth was tainted by operational error.

Well, you say, just wait til 9:33 p.m. Look, I don’t know about you, but by 9:33 on the balmy summer anniversary of my birth, I prefer to be digesting a filet mignon, a twice-baked cheesy potato and a spinach salad with sliced strawberries and Catalina dressing. And I’d rather have a snappy little Shiraz, and not a cocktail of adrenalin and lactic acid, coursing through my veins. In other words, a 9:33 p.m. workout is not an option.

So it was back to the drawing board for the Birthday Workout. Over the course of the next few years, I expanded my workout repertoire to include yoga and swimming. With the Heavy Heart of The Deeply Disillusioned, I continued to do some kind of “special” workout on my birthdays, but I wasn’t feeling the love...until I hit 40 and stumbled onto a new Birthday Workout strategy.

Inspired by my husband’s triathloning, I decided to create my own Birthday Triathlon. That first year, it was 40 minutes of yoga, 40 laps of swimming and 4.0 kilometers of running. Each year, I’d add another minute, length or repetition of whatever I decided to do.

It was after my 44th birthday, two years ago, when I made the swimming segment 44 50s that I realized I had a potential problem. 44 50s wasn’t a problem now, but thinking ahead to, let’s say, my 95th birthday, it might be. I could just see it now: The EMT squad would show up to fish my corpse out of the pool. What would they write for “cause of death” on the official report? “Stupidity.”

So I thought, well, what if I keep adding minutes and repetitions til I get to 50 and then start subtracting them until I zero out on my 100th birthday (when you figure it’ll take the whole day anyway for my 104-year-old husband to serve me my Birthday Dinner)? But that felt too Countdown-ish to Death, so I quickly nixed that idea.

So that leaves me back where I started – working out at the anniversary moment of my birth.

I only have to make one slight modification: We’ll have to move to Hawaii.

In Praise of 6 and Under

I used to think there was nothing better to watch in all of swimming than the 8-year-old & Under age group. But then our summer swim league added a 6 & Under age group, and suddenly Wednesday nights in July got a whole lot better.

“But, Mrs. Coach!” you say. “You’ve been to national meets and seen amazing feats of swimming. You’ve been to an Olympic Trials meet and seen world records happen. And just last night, you were parked in front of your laptop, watching the U.S. World Championship Trials, live and uninterrupted by commercials. Surely one of those meets was the best thing ever to watch in swimming!”

To which I say, “Have you ever seen a 6 & Under 25-yard backstroke?”

We’re talking two, sometimes three, minutes of dramatic intensity, the likes of which Shakespeare himself couldn’t match. There is always, and I do mean always, the quivering excitement of the start. There are legs and arms akimbo, bouncing off lane lines like protons and neutrons inside a nuclear reactor. There are near-drownings (when was the last time you saw that at an Olympic Trials)? There is the agony of victory when somebody finishes the race with their noggin, and there is the thrill of defeat because last place always gets a rousing and heartfelt ovation from the crowd.

There is not a single kid out there who is not giving it his or her all -- an “all,” I might add, that is accomplished without the assistance of buoyancy-aiding, high-tech suits, although occasionally some of the boys finish without their suits if they didn’t tie the drawstrings tight enough.

And there is not a single kid out there who is going to take that race home with them to fuss and fume and obsess about, because most of them have the attention spans of gnats at this age. They’re only in it for the chili dogs and Cherry Slushies.

None of them are going to flunk a drug test because they bought a “bad batch” of Flintstones Chewables. None of them are academically ineligible to compete because some of them haven’t even started school yet. And the only way any of them will end up in an embarrassing YouTube video is if their parents put it there to show the relatives out in Oregon.

So you can have your world-record swims in perfect pool conditions. You can take your collegiate Division I prospects and give them all ice bags for their blown-out shoulders. You can have your Olympic Hopeful 12-year-olds. The only races I will drop everything to watch this summer are the 6 & Unders: They’re everything that’s great about this sport.

It’s Never Too Early to Prognosticate

…And finally we get to the centerpiece event of this year’s Tattimuck County Parks and Recreation League Championships – the Boys’ 10-and-Under 100-yard Medley Relay. But to assess the players this year, we have to go back two years to the Boys’ 8-and-Under edition because that’s the last time this particular set of swimmers went head to head.

Two years ago, it was the Killer Sharks of the Mango Park Swim Club who took the title, not so much because they were the fastest quartet but because they were the only team that wasn’t disqualified. Led by backstroker Fred “Floater” Zingermann, the team also featured breaststroker Jonathon “Two-Hand Touch” Wing, butterflyer Charley “Wiggle” Wiggins and anchor freestyler Sam “Scooter” Schnipke. And two years ago, they put together a performance that left even their parents stunned and speechless. Insiders say the Mango Park boys are older and more legal than ever, even though they lost Wing to the country-club league when his dad got a promotion at work. According to their coach, Mindy Schwicker, the game plan is to have Rafael Esterhazy, a 7-year-old with a pituitary-gland disorder and hands the size of dinner plates, swim up an age group for the breaststroke leg.

The Killer Sharks likely will be challenged by their annual nemeses – the Waterbugs of the Waterloo Aquatics Racing Team. The Waterbugs – comprised of backstroke specialist Lindeman Farnhauser, breaststroker Chavis Rodriguez and the interchangeable flyer-freestyler twins, Rick and Dick Postlewaite – have always been something of a wild-card team in the league, prone to record-setting swims one week and flagrant DQs the next. Their own coach, Dorfy McDufferman, has described the team thusly: “One half of this relay is medicated and the other half should be.”

Also challenging for the title might be the Sea Stars of the Southwest Swim and Racquet Club. The Sea Stars are a new team in the league this year, having voluntarily moved over from the country-club league. The Southwest Swim and Racquet Club itself went bankrupt in January but the swim team has continued to practice, using the Pfeiffer-Newton family’s backyard 50-meter pool as its home facility. The Pfeiffer-Newtons’ son Tanqueray is the team’s anchor. While some in the league question whether the young man, who is already shaving hair off many different parts of his body, is actually 10 years old, the threat of legal action from his parents has convinced the league to allow him to compete in this age group. Pfeiffer-Newton is joined on the relay by backstroker Kirk Sphincter-Howland, breaststroker Stansbury Thurman-Dobbs and butterflyer Ashley Hinker-Wheaterman.

Despite the fact that both the Waterbugs and the Sea Stars look better on paper, we’re going to have to stick with the Killer Sharks and pick them to win this year’s title. They have proven, time and again, they have the stubbornness to keep their strokes legal and the slow reaction time to prevent false starts.

Decisions, Decisions

It’s that time of the year when swim parents face some serious choices: concession stand or event timing, split recording or raffle ticket shilling, ribbon writing or hiding in the bathroom so the volunteer coordinator doesn’t find you and make you wait out front for the pizza delivery guy. Summer-league swimming is a machine that runs on volunteerism, and the sooner you figure out what you can tolerate, the more sane you’re likely to be by the end of the meet.

In the past, I’ve usually volunteered to write up what gets posted on the team’s Web site (schedules, directions to meets, meet summaries, and step-by-step instructions for how to put a swim cap on for all our newbie parents). This year I decided to take a break from the writing (due in no small part to the fact that we’re avoiding too much contact with one of the summer coaches who stiffed us $419 in USS team tuition – long, sordid story there). So instead I’m concession-standing it. I’d like to think I’m helping the team every time I talk a kid out of that second chili dog, 10 minutes before his or her next swim.

Mr. Coach usually gets commandeered to run the timing system at home meets which only makes sense since he’s the only one who really understands how it works, though he’s been trying to train other people so he can see Little Mr. Coach swim occasionally.

Neither one of us volunteers for backup timing duties because we know what a few hours of standing on a concrete pool deck will do to your legs. Nothing good, I can tell you. Likewise with running the cards on which the event hand-times are jotted down, back and forth to the folks working the timing system console. One mom who swam competitively often volunteers to be a stroke judge, but she rarely DQs anyone, least of all her own flutter-kicking butterflyer child. And then there are always the parents who volunteer to do backup timing but only for the lanes their kids are swimming in. But that’s why there’s at least two adults working each lane.

Yes, summer-league volunteering is a carefully choreographed dance of mixed motivations and even more mixed results. Yet somehow in the end it all works and, of course, the kids never realize how much work goes into making their meets happen.

Movin' On

Most people probably assume that a coach would rather die than see a single athlete give up the sport that he or she coaches. Not true. There’s a natural lifespan to most athletic careers. Of course some have a very long lifespan. Take U.S. swimmer Yoshi Oyakawa, the 1952 Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter backstroke. Just this past March, after aging up to the 75-79 age group, he swam the 50-yard backstroke in 33.37 seconds. If I didn’t have such good self esteem, hearing that would make me want to quit swimming and take up golf. He’s unbelievable.

A more normal competitive lifespan sees athletes through age-group, then high school and maybe even college and beyond with the competitions. But not always. Sometimes the lifespan is shorter, but you always hope that the primary reason someone decides to move on from a particular sport is because they found something else that excited them more in life. Take our daughter, for example. Blessed with equal dollops of talent for swimming and ballet, we knew she’d eventually have to make a choice as to which one she’d pursue. Little Miss Coach was a very good backstroker as a youngster. After one particularly good meet, when she sliced her way down a 50-meter pool into the 10-and-under national rankings that year, I said to her, “Holy cow, honey, what did you do different this time that it looked so fast?” She grinned and said, “I did it to the Radetzky March.”


That’s when we realized her days in swimming were numbered. (Even better was when I told one of her ballet teachers about her humming Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March to herself during that race, and he replied, “Well, yes, of course. She was harnessing her creative energy to resolve the challenge she had been presented with.” Seriously, that is exactly what he said. When she complains now about some of the fluffernutters teaching and directing her, I just hum the Radetzky March.)

Sometimes college athletes take a break, maybe for studies abroad or to act in a university play. Sometimes they return to swimming, but often they simply move on. Fortunately, though, they move on with happy memories of their time in the sport. And they probably still get in the pool every now and then.

What you don’t want to see are the kids who give it up because they burned out and now hate the sport. Usually when you encounter athletes like that, there’s a rabid adult right behind them – either a parent or a coach -- who made them feel like a failure for not achieving specific goals. And it’s not just limited to swimming either. We’ve seen this kind of self-loathing, adult-induced burnout in all kinds of sports, ballet and music. You want to take all the fun and future out of an activity for kids? Saddle them with adults’ ambitions on their way to those finish lines or curtain calls.

But if you want them to enjoy the journey, then step back and be amazed as they move on.

How the Deck Was Won

As we head into the outdoor swim season now, parents find themselves challenged with a fundamental shift in the viewing situation. With indoor swimming, there is usually tiered seating in stands, so you’re able to get a decent view of the pool from just about anywhere in a natatorium. It might get a little uncomfortable if you’re sitting next to one of those Sunday New York Times toters (like me) but you’ll be able to see the pool (if you can just chill out and deal with the rustling paper, it’s not like I’m blocking your view).

Outdoor swim meets are like the Wild West – lawless, uncivilized and based entirely on the concept of squatter’s rights. If you’re the first one to park your chair on the deck next to the starting blocks, that view is yours -- until somebody else puts another chair in front of you. Doesn’t even matter if your chair happens to be of the wheelchair variety. I’ve seen people block out their own grandparents when there’s still an inch of deck space to be snagged.

I tend to utilize the in-and-out method of outdoor-swim-meet spectatorship myself, sort of like the nomadic Native Americans who moved to follow the animals they hunted. I place my chair as far from the meet as possible but where I’m still able to hear the P.A. system announce events. Then, when there’s an event I want to see, I walk over, scootch in where I’m least likely to encounter resistance, watch and then leave. But like the Native Americans, I have been displaced many times and I am a little bitter about it.

But many parents like to stake out turf and defend it to the death (or the end of the meet, whichever comes first). One way to make this work is to bring your entire extended family. There’s this one family in our summer league that always manages to snag the most primo viewing spot on the far side of the pool near the leisure-pool slide: It’s a narrow peninsula of space that defies turf warring. They get it by showing up early, armed with lawn chairs, food coolers and a fairly extensive record of involvement with the local court system.

And then others will employ the “if it’s covered with a towel, it’s mine” strategy (I’ve heard this is how Wyoming was settled.) This strategy is used in the tiny stands which seat about 27 people. The coaches have tried to place limits on just how many seats can be saved, but that rarely works because parents who have been coming to these meets for years do whatever they want. In my humble opinion, anyone who has not seen Wednesday night TV in July since Clinton’s first term has earned the right to park their carcasses wherever they want. It’s how the deck was won.

No, But Semi-Seriously, Folks...

Because the response to news of the Channeling Peace Initiative has been so strong, I thought I at least owe Mr. Coach and his prospective English Channel-swimming athletes a full blog about their highly admirable endeavor. CliffsNotes’ version: American David and Pakistani Usman, who both swim for Mr. Coach’s college team, are going to do a relay swim across the English Channel in early August (check out the Channeling Peace Initiative Web site). It’s their way of saying, “See? We can all get along in this world if we just try a little harder.”

And by “try a little harder,” they mean “swim 21 miles through very cold salt water.” The rest of us just have to promise to stop killing each other.

It’s a very cool idea, though I’m not really sure how they came up with it. One day, Mr. Coach came home and said something like, “David and Usman are thinking of swimming the English Channel this summer as a show of support for the power of international friendship.” And I thought maybe he was hallucinating because he had ridden his bike for three hours that day, so I just got him his dinner a little faster.

But a few weeks after that, it started coming together with the fundraising and the publicity, and now, as the expression goes in peace-initiative circles, they are so screwed because they are really going to have to do this. And so is Mr. Coach, who will be getting in and out of the pilot boat to pace them. He’s been swimming with me to get in shape for it – and can I just say I do NOT appreciate his sprinting past me when he’s doing his pull-buoy laps (and, yes, you are sprinting).

But the Coach Family is nothing if not supportive of world peace and bridging the gap between cultures. Why, the photo that graces today’s blog is a perfect example of how much we have done to help Usman learn about American culture. You see, it was taken during the November of Usman’s freshman year. Mr. Coach, Usman and I were at the pool one day during Thanksgiving break. He was stranded there at school for the break (although I think he went to David’s for Thanksgiving dinner; I know we had him over for Christmas).

So there he was, doing his workout in Lane 3. And there I was in Lane 6 while Mr. Coach was on deck with our camera. It had already been quite an adjustment for Usman to get comfortable swimming with women, but he was getting there. And on that day, we really helped him “get there.”

I needed a photo of me doing a flip turn for our Christmas newsletter (obviously it’s not your average Christmas newsletter). So I would swim toward the wall, do a flip turn and Mr. Coach would try to snap a picture at the right time. You could just about hear poor Usman’s sphincter slamming shut every time Mr. Coach shouted, “Nope, you gotta keep your butt in the air longer! Let’s try it again, but slower!”

Well, eventually we got our shot and thankfully Usman didn’t quit the team or need psychotherapy. And he’s done a lot since then to educate us about his country and culture.

Now he and David are going to do a lot to educate us about the power of international friendship. I can think of easier ways they could accomplish that, but I doubt I could think of a better way.