Division III (a.k.a. "D3") swimming is a breed unto itself. For those not familiar with this term, it refers to a particular category of U.S. universities under the umbrella of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (or “NCAA” to those in the know… “NCs” if you want make it sound like you’re a college sports veteran.)
Anyway, the NCAA is divided into three divisions: Division I schools tend to be larger universities and, as long as they have the money (an increasingly shaky assumption), they can give out sports scholarships. Division II schools tend to be smaller public universities and they also can give out sports scholarship money, though not as much.
Division III is what I call the “Chariots of Fire” division: Its founding philosophy derives from ye not-so-olde days when sport was viewed as a lovely part of a well-rounded lifestyle for which monetary compensation was viewed with disdain (like in the movie “Chariots of Fire”). Where a student-athlete spent his or her day developing a research project to restructure a small East Asian nation’s debt load, completing a vigorous workout in the pool while discussing Emily Dickinson’s mid-career poetry between sets with the other sprinters, and then dining with local dignitaries on oysters, terrapin soup and roast duckling, whilst using the correct utensils.
There also used to be a requirement that coaches of Division III teams had to be academic professors. That died out a couple of decades ago, though there are a few genuine professor/coaches left, including Mr. Coach.
Division III as originally designed was a lovely sepia-toned vision of "mens sana in corpore sano” (that’s Latin for “a sound mind in a sound body”). But “D3” has pretty much gone Technicolor and High-Definition now in its pursuit of “citius, altius, fortius” (that’s Olympic Latin for “swifter, higher, stronger”). Consequently we’re left with a division that is peppered with programs where athlete-students don’t have the time to do anything other than eat, sleep, swim and attend a few classes.
But not all of them are like this. There are still a few Division III programs where you get an intriguing mix of overachievers who are determined to cram everything into their days they possibly can…and then some. About this time of the year is when Mr. Coach finds himself having many, many discussions about time management with his young charges.
“Do you think I can take four science labs this semester, Coach?” one will ask him as they sit in his office.
“Only if your goal is to have a nervous breakdown by Halloween,” Mr. Coach will reply.
“But only one of them overlaps with practice on Wednesdays.”
“Even if you weren’t swimming, you wouldn’t take four labs in one semester,” Mr. Coach points out. “If you do, then I have to notify Counseling Services.”
“OK,” the student-athlete will pause and reconsider. “How about three labs, one Habitat for Humanity house-building project on Sunday afternoons, and the first bassoon seat in the university orchestra?”
That’s when Mr. Coach reaches for the can of wasabi peas in his top drawer. It’s not easy, but somebody has to coach these kids.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Wet and Dry
As I have exhaustively documented, the life of a swim coach’s spouse is nothing if not exhausting. And one of the biggest challenges I face each year, right around this time, is learning to identify the newcomers. Usually they’re freshmen, but occasionally you get transfers or upperclassmen who have sufficiently recovered from the trauma of a bad high-school or club swimming experience to give the sport a try again.
But this isn’t a matter of just matching a name to a face and a set of details that Mr. Coach has heaved at me (which usually goes something like, “He’s the one from Kansas…5:06 but never trained right…6’3”, 130…and, best of all, he put ‘Monty Python’s Holy Grail’ down on the questionnaire as his favorite movie”; Mr. Coach takes great pride in his questionnaires. You can definitely tell a lot about someone from asking what their favorite color, workout, book and movie are. Or whether they even turned the questionnaire in. [Insert judgmental-raising-of-one-eyebrow emoticon here.])
But back to me. No, the hardest part with matching these names to faces is that I have to learn how to match these names to two types of faces – one wet and one dry. Most people look completely different when they’re dripping wet.
It’s not as hard with the guys. Thanks to the vagaries of male growth patterns, there’s enough variety in their builds to give me a running start on positive identification. The challenge is when your beanpole freshmen guys return from a summer of massive growth spurts and suddenly have pecs and facial hair. It’s like meeting a whole new person.
But generally it’s the girls who are hardest to sort out because they wear caps and sometimes I can go an entire season without seeing their hair until one day, Mr. Coach and I are walking in town and he’ll say hi to some bright-faced coed with an explosive halo of frizzy brown hair and, after she passes, he’ll be like, “That was Araminta. You know, the one whose mom brings soup to the home meets.” And I’ll be like, “Whaaaat?” because the Araminta I’ve met and even discussed soup stocks with does not have that much hair. And yet it is Araminta.
Sometimes Mr. Coach will bring in a batch of freshmen who, through no fault of his or theirs, all look alike. There was a stretch of about three years there which I refer to as “The Blonde Years” when every freshman girl had a round Caucasian face, shoulder-length blonde hair and no bangs. Some of them graduated without my ever addressing them by name because I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Blonde No. 3 or Blonde No. 14. I had to have stern words with Mr. Coach and motivate him to put a little more effort into the brunette and women-of-color department. Thankfully he has and I’m back on track. And now I’m back for another season of matching names to wet and dry faces. Wish me luck!
But this isn’t a matter of just matching a name to a face and a set of details that Mr. Coach has heaved at me (which usually goes something like, “He’s the one from Kansas…5:06 but never trained right…6’3”, 130…and, best of all, he put ‘Monty Python’s Holy Grail’ down on the questionnaire as his favorite movie”; Mr. Coach takes great pride in his questionnaires. You can definitely tell a lot about someone from asking what their favorite color, workout, book and movie are. Or whether they even turned the questionnaire in. [Insert judgmental-raising-of-one-eyebrow emoticon here.])
But back to me. No, the hardest part with matching these names to faces is that I have to learn how to match these names to two types of faces – one wet and one dry. Most people look completely different when they’re dripping wet.
It’s not as hard with the guys. Thanks to the vagaries of male growth patterns, there’s enough variety in their builds to give me a running start on positive identification. The challenge is when your beanpole freshmen guys return from a summer of massive growth spurts and suddenly have pecs and facial hair. It’s like meeting a whole new person.
But generally it’s the girls who are hardest to sort out because they wear caps and sometimes I can go an entire season without seeing their hair until one day, Mr. Coach and I are walking in town and he’ll say hi to some bright-faced coed with an explosive halo of frizzy brown hair and, after she passes, he’ll be like, “That was Araminta. You know, the one whose mom brings soup to the home meets.” And I’ll be like, “Whaaaat?” because the Araminta I’ve met and even discussed soup stocks with does not have that much hair. And yet it is Araminta.
Sometimes Mr. Coach will bring in a batch of freshmen who, through no fault of his or theirs, all look alike. There was a stretch of about three years there which I refer to as “The Blonde Years” when every freshman girl had a round Caucasian face, shoulder-length blonde hair and no bangs. Some of them graduated without my ever addressing them by name because I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Blonde No. 3 or Blonde No. 14. I had to have stern words with Mr. Coach and motivate him to put a little more effort into the brunette and women-of-color department. Thankfully he has and I’m back on track. And now I’m back for another season of matching names to wet and dry faces. Wish me luck!
Sunday, August 23, 2009
The Pre-Season Panic Season
It is indeed that time of the year which we in the Coach Family household affectionately refer to as the “Pre-Season Panic” season.
Typically it begins a couple of weeks after the calendar turns from July to August. The subject awakens one morning (or afternoon, as the case may be). A stomach-acid panic attack suddenly grips the subject when it spies the pile of luggage and empty boxes that the subject’s mother has dumped on the floor of the bedroom some time during its slumber.
The subject stumbles to the bathroom and steps on a scale – only to discover that it cannot see the numbers on the scale because of the bulge of flesh blocking the view. The subject sucks the bulge in, only to confirm that it now has less than a month to regain the fitness and physique that will enable it to “fool” its college swim coach into thinking that it spent the summer doing triathlons, hiking the Appalachian Trail and putting a new roof on the local convent like it said it would back in May. (When, needless to say, the subject’s main accomplishment that summer had been something that involved five wooden palettes, 12 yards of surgical tubing, one herd of Guernsey cows, and a Latvian au pair.)
The subject lumbers into the kitchen where its mother has already laid in a supply of rice cakes and protein shakes. The industrial-sized box of Sugar Bomb Oaties has been discarded. After a 14-calorie breakfast (or lunch, as the case may be), the subject spends the next half-hour in the basement, digging through boxes still unopened since May until it finds a pair of goggles and a swimsuit, both caked with mildew but otherwise useable. And then it’s off to the local pool where the subject puts in a brisk 8,000 yards of swimming (half of it with a pull-buoy because too much kicking too soon is bad for the…well, it’s just bad).
The subject does not swim for the next five days but does ingest the maximum allowable daily dosage of ibuprofen and rice cakes. And it does go bike riding once with its grandmother who dusts the subject going up that one hill. The subject feigns a groin injury then drives Granny back to the nursing home.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the subject maintains a scrupulous regimen of dwindling swim yardage, run-jog-walks around the neighborhood, more ibuprofen, and building a tan which would bespeak a summer of vigorous outdoor activity. By the time the subject returns to college, it has whittled two inches off a well-tanned waistline but gained an additional five pounds (all muscle, it insists). The coach takes one look at the subject, rolls his or her eyes, then says, “Open swim’s from 11 to 2 each day.”
Welcome back, kids!
Typically it begins a couple of weeks after the calendar turns from July to August. The subject awakens one morning (or afternoon, as the case may be). A stomach-acid panic attack suddenly grips the subject when it spies the pile of luggage and empty boxes that the subject’s mother has dumped on the floor of the bedroom some time during its slumber.
The subject stumbles to the bathroom and steps on a scale – only to discover that it cannot see the numbers on the scale because of the bulge of flesh blocking the view. The subject sucks the bulge in, only to confirm that it now has less than a month to regain the fitness and physique that will enable it to “fool” its college swim coach into thinking that it spent the summer doing triathlons, hiking the Appalachian Trail and putting a new roof on the local convent like it said it would back in May. (When, needless to say, the subject’s main accomplishment that summer had been something that involved five wooden palettes, 12 yards of surgical tubing, one herd of Guernsey cows, and a Latvian au pair.)
The subject lumbers into the kitchen where its mother has already laid in a supply of rice cakes and protein shakes. The industrial-sized box of Sugar Bomb Oaties has been discarded. After a 14-calorie breakfast (or lunch, as the case may be), the subject spends the next half-hour in the basement, digging through boxes still unopened since May until it finds a pair of goggles and a swimsuit, both caked with mildew but otherwise useable. And then it’s off to the local pool where the subject puts in a brisk 8,000 yards of swimming (half of it with a pull-buoy because too much kicking too soon is bad for the…well, it’s just bad).
The subject does not swim for the next five days but does ingest the maximum allowable daily dosage of ibuprofen and rice cakes. And it does go bike riding once with its grandmother who dusts the subject going up that one hill. The subject feigns a groin injury then drives Granny back to the nursing home.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the subject maintains a scrupulous regimen of dwindling swim yardage, run-jog-walks around the neighborhood, more ibuprofen, and building a tan which would bespeak a summer of vigorous outdoor activity. By the time the subject returns to college, it has whittled two inches off a well-tanned waistline but gained an additional five pounds (all muscle, it insists). The coach takes one look at the subject, rolls his or her eyes, then says, “Open swim’s from 11 to 2 each day.”
Welcome back, kids!
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Channeling Peace, A Story in 427 Parts
I realize that the most efficient way to finish telling you about the Channeling Peace Initiative of 2009 would have been to write it up and post it last Sunday. But that would have been to assume that Mr. Coach had already told me everything that happened such that the narrative of their adventure could just write itself.
But that would also be to assume that Mr. Coach thinks in narrative form. And he doesn’t. It’s more like bullet-point form. And there’s no telling what’s going to shake a bullet point loose. The other day, it was the smell coming out of the kitchen garbage can. Next thing I knew, he was out the back door and then back in again, carrying a pair of sneakers that had been sitting outside since he got back.
“Smell this,” he said, holding them up.
I know, I know. Probably not the smartest move, but seeing as how Mr. Coach is not the type to abuse the privilege of telling me to smell random things, I thought, “OK, what the heck.”
The shoe smell was a doozy, immediately summoning childhood memories of when our dog Bobo went swimming in the creek.
“That’s the English Channel,” Mr. Coach said proudly. The shoes were the ones he wore for David’s relay swim on Thursday, Aug. 6. They had gotten soaked but good, not during the 13 hours and 25 minutes it took to get to France, but on the 3-hour boat ride back. He had spent it on the back end of the boat, getting splashed by the waves. We agreed he could pitch the shoes and get new ones.
So little pieces of the story keep dribbling out. There’s been the story about running into a guy from Chicago who swam for him 10 years ago: They were all visiting Dover Castle at the same time. That was a little surreal. I’ve also heard about the meat pies and the hikes through the English countryside.
If you followed along on Facebook, where I was posting the URLs from GPS pings that David’s mom sent out every 15-60 minutes, you know that we were following the team’s progress across the Channel (they showed up as a little green arrow on a Google map). They started at about 9:30 a.m., their time in Dover (4:30 a.m. my time) and went until 11 p.m. their time (6 p.m. mine). The relay consisted of 21-year-old David, 71-year-old Stanley (founder of the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in Florida), Clive who is British and that’s all Mr. Coach is remembering right now, and Ann, another Brit about whom he also remembers little except she’s dreamed of swimming the Channel since she was a little girl (I wonder if that’s a British thing).
Toward the end, we noticed that the little green arrow started drifting south and further away from Calais, France, which is the traditional destination. Anne, a veteran Channel swimmer, was serving as our online expert analyst. She’s done several solo crossings herself, including a “there and back” double. Ouch.
Anyway, Anne explained to us online that currents and winds out of the ENE were probably pushing the swimmers southwest. They would be aiming for a small bit of beach just south of the lighthouse at Cap Gris-Nez called “Dragon’s Teeth.” If they didn’t make it, she explained, they’d have to either head further south toward Boulogne-sur-Mer to find land-able shoreline or wait until the tides change and double back around the Cap toward Calais. Either way, it would be another 5 or 6 hours of swimming if they didn’t make it to Dragon’s Teeth.
We watched online as the arrow finally righted itself and began heading due East toward the Cap. If you clicked on the satellite version of the Google map, you could see this was where the water color changed from dark blue to light blue, but you could also make out how rocky and steep the French coast was with one small clear spit of sand.
“now is where the swimmer must sprint to make land…if they pass Cap Gris Nez it will be a while…”, posted Anne.
And at that moment, Mr. Coach remembered a couple of days later, David was indeed sprinting across the strong current. He got them to within 400 meters of shore, and then in went Stanley who was the swimmer to make land. He picked up souvenir rocks for his teammates, tucked them into his swim suit and then rode the accompanying dinghy boat back out to the waiting Viking Princess fishing boat where everyone else was.
They ate scones and jam on the boat ride back (during which time the weather disintegrated). But David’s mom’s Dramamine worked this time and she was fine. Wet and cold, but otherwise fine. David was very sore the next day, but now Mr. Coach has something to heave in his face the next time he complains about fly day during the college season.
And Usman did his long-distance swim in solidarity with David, two days later in a 25-meter pool in Pakistan. He swam for 8 hours and was probably a babbling idiot by the time he was done. I saw what he was like, back in April, when he and David did a four-hour swim in the university’s pool, and it was not pretty.
It still doesn’t make much sense, why the British government wouldn’t issue Usman an entry visa to swim the Channel, but I'm not going to dwell on that. Instead, I’m going to dwell on the fact that Mr. Coach just told me that he thinks the university team should make this a biennial or triennial thing, to take a relay over and swim the English Channel. They want to keep the Channeling Peace movement going. That’s great, I said. I just want to know who’s going to pay for all the new sneakers.
But that would also be to assume that Mr. Coach thinks in narrative form. And he doesn’t. It’s more like bullet-point form. And there’s no telling what’s going to shake a bullet point loose. The other day, it was the smell coming out of the kitchen garbage can. Next thing I knew, he was out the back door and then back in again, carrying a pair of sneakers that had been sitting outside since he got back.
“Smell this,” he said, holding them up.
I know, I know. Probably not the smartest move, but seeing as how Mr. Coach is not the type to abuse the privilege of telling me to smell random things, I thought, “OK, what the heck.”
The shoe smell was a doozy, immediately summoning childhood memories of when our dog Bobo went swimming in the creek.
“That’s the English Channel,” Mr. Coach said proudly. The shoes were the ones he wore for David’s relay swim on Thursday, Aug. 6. They had gotten soaked but good, not during the 13 hours and 25 minutes it took to get to France, but on the 3-hour boat ride back. He had spent it on the back end of the boat, getting splashed by the waves. We agreed he could pitch the shoes and get new ones.
So little pieces of the story keep dribbling out. There’s been the story about running into a guy from Chicago who swam for him 10 years ago: They were all visiting Dover Castle at the same time. That was a little surreal. I’ve also heard about the meat pies and the hikes through the English countryside.
If you followed along on Facebook, where I was posting the URLs from GPS pings that David’s mom sent out every 15-60 minutes, you know that we were following the team’s progress across the Channel (they showed up as a little green arrow on a Google map). They started at about 9:30 a.m., their time in Dover (4:30 a.m. my time) and went until 11 p.m. their time (6 p.m. mine). The relay consisted of 21-year-old David, 71-year-old Stanley (founder of the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in Florida), Clive who is British and that’s all Mr. Coach is remembering right now, and Ann, another Brit about whom he also remembers little except she’s dreamed of swimming the Channel since she was a little girl (I wonder if that’s a British thing).
Toward the end, we noticed that the little green arrow started drifting south and further away from Calais, France, which is the traditional destination. Anne, a veteran Channel swimmer, was serving as our online expert analyst. She’s done several solo crossings herself, including a “there and back” double. Ouch.
Anyway, Anne explained to us online that currents and winds out of the ENE were probably pushing the swimmers southwest. They would be aiming for a small bit of beach just south of the lighthouse at Cap Gris-Nez called “Dragon’s Teeth.” If they didn’t make it, she explained, they’d have to either head further south toward Boulogne-sur-Mer to find land-able shoreline or wait until the tides change and double back around the Cap toward Calais. Either way, it would be another 5 or 6 hours of swimming if they didn’t make it to Dragon’s Teeth.
We watched online as the arrow finally righted itself and began heading due East toward the Cap. If you clicked on the satellite version of the Google map, you could see this was where the water color changed from dark blue to light blue, but you could also make out how rocky and steep the French coast was with one small clear spit of sand.
“now is where the swimmer must sprint to make land…if they pass Cap Gris Nez it will be a while…”, posted Anne.
And at that moment, Mr. Coach remembered a couple of days later, David was indeed sprinting across the strong current. He got them to within 400 meters of shore, and then in went Stanley who was the swimmer to make land. He picked up souvenir rocks for his teammates, tucked them into his swim suit and then rode the accompanying dinghy boat back out to the waiting Viking Princess fishing boat where everyone else was.
They ate scones and jam on the boat ride back (during which time the weather disintegrated). But David’s mom’s Dramamine worked this time and she was fine. Wet and cold, but otherwise fine. David was very sore the next day, but now Mr. Coach has something to heave in his face the next time he complains about fly day during the college season.
And Usman did his long-distance swim in solidarity with David, two days later in a 25-meter pool in Pakistan. He swam for 8 hours and was probably a babbling idiot by the time he was done. I saw what he was like, back in April, when he and David did a four-hour swim in the university’s pool, and it was not pretty.
It still doesn’t make much sense, why the British government wouldn’t issue Usman an entry visa to swim the Channel, but I'm not going to dwell on that. Instead, I’m going to dwell on the fact that Mr. Coach just told me that he thinks the university team should make this a biennial or triennial thing, to take a relay over and swim the English Channel. They want to keep the Channeling Peace movement going. That’s great, I said. I just want to know who’s going to pay for all the new sneakers.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
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.)
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.)
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Once More with Feeling
Channel Swim, version 2.0. Around 9:30 a.m. (British Summer Time), David took off again, this time as part of a four-swimmer relay attempt to swim across the English Channel. If you have access to Facebook, please join the Channeling Peace Initiative group (it's an open group so it shouldn't require any administrating to join). I'm posting the "GPS pings" that David's mom, Tami, is sending every so often. It's a really fun way to "watch" the progress!
*****
Edited to add at around 7 p.m., EDT: We just got phone calls from the boat, letting us know that after 13 hours and 25 minutes of swimming, David and his three teammates successfully swam across the English Channel. They made landfall about 11 p.m. BST near the lighthouse at Cap Gris-Nez. David was not the last swimmer who got to go ashore, but his teammate brought him back a souvenir French rock (or "caillou" for you purists). He also made a new friend along the way -- a seal who swam with him for a while in an epic show of inter-species solidarity. Now they are headed back to Dover on the boat, and are eating scones and jam! Thanks, everyone, for following along today!
Monday, August 3, 2009
Just Keep Channeling....
Right now it's getting on to supper time over in the U.K. My husband had said he was going to take a nap after this morning's attempt but I have a feeling he's been too adrenalized to do much sleeping. There have been a few emails with references to long hikes along the coastline. Dick got to swim a bit with David during the nearly four hours that it took David to go an estimated 10 kilometers (that's 6.2 miles to us Yanks), but I know all their brains are still whirling.
Copied below is Dick's first collection of thoughts on the attempt. I hope you enjoy reading it as much I did:
"What David did today was amazing and I am beyond proud of his accomplishment of swimming for nearly four hours in his channel-crossing attempt. He endured a physical challenge that most of us will never understand. This takes a very special type of motivation, one that not all of us possess. While David had some external motivators, his mom, Tami, the boat pilot, Andy, myself and even chocolate, none of these have the ability to drive someone to what David accomplished. To overcome what he endured and to keep going for the period of time he was swimming takes extreme internal motivation. Those of you who know David understand this attribute and yes it is even stronger that the promise of chocolate. The success in this crossing attempt is not in the completion but in the intended goal, process, experience and what is learned. We never really expected David to make this solo crossing but instead to swim as far as David possibly could in the conditions on that day. He did that and will take this experience with him the rest of his life.
I feel disappointed for David and Usman in that they will not get to do their Channeling Peace Initiative relay across the channel as originally planned. After what I witnessed today, I feel quite certain that they would have been successful. It would not have been easy, but they could have accomplished one of their goals in the intended endeavor.
It was not the intent of the Channeling Peace Initiative to have David attempt a solo English Channel swim. Due to some bumps along the path to the intended endeavor, when Usman’s visa request was denied, David and Usman agreed upon a backup plan. This new plan included a solo channel attempt by David and a virtual channel swim by Usman in his pool in Pakistan. We now anxiously await Usman’s swim in Lahore, Pakistan in the next few days. It is so wonderful to see the resourcefulness of these two young men when faced with a challenge over which they have no control. They have kept the real meaning behind Channeling Peace alive with their ability to adapt. And as Usman put it in the CNN article: "Even if I have to swim in a lake in Pakistan while David swims in the English Channel, it's still a powerful symbol."
"Symbols gather power not from the act itself but from the people who are supporting them," he said. "A lot of people around the world are supporting us and our message. As long as they support it in their hearts and minds, we have been successful." "
Copied below is Dick's first collection of thoughts on the attempt. I hope you enjoy reading it as much I did:
"What David did today was amazing and I am beyond proud of his accomplishment of swimming for nearly four hours in his channel-crossing attempt. He endured a physical challenge that most of us will never understand. This takes a very special type of motivation, one that not all of us possess. While David had some external motivators, his mom, Tami, the boat pilot, Andy, myself and even chocolate, none of these have the ability to drive someone to what David accomplished. To overcome what he endured and to keep going for the period of time he was swimming takes extreme internal motivation. Those of you who know David understand this attribute and yes it is even stronger that the promise of chocolate. The success in this crossing attempt is not in the completion but in the intended goal, process, experience and what is learned. We never really expected David to make this solo crossing but instead to swim as far as David possibly could in the conditions on that day. He did that and will take this experience with him the rest of his life.
I feel disappointed for David and Usman in that they will not get to do their Channeling Peace Initiative relay across the channel as originally planned. After what I witnessed today, I feel quite certain that they would have been successful. It would not have been easy, but they could have accomplished one of their goals in the intended endeavor.
It was not the intent of the Channeling Peace Initiative to have David attempt a solo English Channel swim. Due to some bumps along the path to the intended endeavor, when Usman’s visa request was denied, David and Usman agreed upon a backup plan. This new plan included a solo channel attempt by David and a virtual channel swim by Usman in his pool in Pakistan. We now anxiously await Usman’s swim in Lahore, Pakistan in the next few days. It is so wonderful to see the resourcefulness of these two young men when faced with a challenge over which they have no control. They have kept the real meaning behind Channeling Peace alive with their ability to adapt. And as Usman put it in the CNN article: "Even if I have to swim in a lake in Pakistan while David swims in the English Channel, it's still a powerful symbol."
"Symbols gather power not from the act itself but from the people who are supporting them," he said. "A lot of people around the world are supporting us and our message. As long as they support it in their hearts and minds, we have been successful." "
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