Here’s a piece I wrote 21 years ago, never finished. Since I can’t remember the ending, I’m archiving it here for posterity 😉
Over 32 years – more than a lifetime – ago, I swam my last race in college. I’d stayed up most of the night before with my girlfriend in her Cambridge apartment. I’d gotten special dispensation from the coach to drive up by myself, and stay away from the motel where the rest of the team slept, before the MIT meet. I guess he didn’t care much about me, as I was only the second- or third-string breaststroker worth, at best, 1 or 3 points in the meet. I got a second placed, earned my senior letter, and quit the team the next day. I was so tired of being tired all the ime from swim practices. After exams, I left for home and, having enough credits to graduate, spent the rest of the winter as a ski bum in Aspen. Except for one failed attempt at Masters swimming 6 years later, this ended my competitive athletic career.
When I was younger, I thought myself quite independent, a self-made man. My parents nurtured the myth in me that my direction was mine alone; they got out of the way while I made my own choices. In truth, however, they molded my future as surely as the wind sculpts Utah sandstone.
Every summer, the first day out of school would find my sister and I at a swimming pool. Early on, it would be one of the local, community pools. But in 1957 we joined a Private Pool, called Indian Hill. These clubs were popping up all around Cincinnati, where I grew up. Indian Hill was the top tier suburb then, sort of a New Trier or Brentwood for our beloved Porkopolis. We knew it was an improvement over the public pools, because we didn’t have to get out every hour to splash our legs at the edge of the pool while a lifeguard poured chlorine powder over our heads into the foam. Indian Hill had an automatic chlorinator.
The major excitement, the first three years we were there, was the annual “first day sunburn”. Somehow, neither my mother nor I would remember to smear sun tan lotion (probably zero SPF anyway) on me, and I would return from that first day at the pool pink and prickly, unable to tolerate a shower or even a cotton T-shirt for days afterwards.
Three years later, my father made a fateful offer to me. He had managed to put together three seemingly unrelated facts: like most 11-year olds living in a big league town, I loved baseball – or rather, the Cincinnati Reds; I spent a lot of time in the summer at the swimming pool, mostly lounging around; and Japanese transistor radios now cost only $29.95. A transistor radio was about the size of a pack of cards, running on a pair of AA batteries, with a tinny 2-inch and only an AM dial. You held it to your ear for full effect, or used a single ear-plug speaker for privacy. With the radio, I could listen to Waite Hoyt calling the games all summer. I could also listen to the night tie DJs play the music my sister was starting to buy on 45s.
My father promised to buy me that radio if I joined the Indian Hill swim team. Seemed like a no-brainer to me: I knew how to swim, I was at the pool every day, how hard could it be? The first day of practice, I walked down to the lap pool, newly built, terraced just below out beloved “L” pool, to meet Yoshi Oyakawa. Tumor had it he had been a gold medaslist (in breast-stroke) for Japan in the 1952 Olympics. He was wide as a house and bronze as a South Pacific surfer. He told me to jump in the water and swim a lap, “to see what you can do. What I could do was a head out of the water breast-stroke.
He must have taught me a few things. By the end of the summer, I had a whole collection of red and white ribbons from dual meets in the Private Pool Swim League. I never once got a blue ribbon because Skip – full name Newton Hudson Bullard III – was also on our team. He went on to become the President of his high school class, go to Harvard, and, for all I know, become CEO of some bank in Chicago. He was that kind of guy, just an all-round good citizen.
And he became the first of a series of breaststrokers on my own team, be it AAU, high school, or college, who would be better than me. I garnered an amazing collection of second and third place awards and came to realize that was my lot in life. No matter how much I practice or refined my stroke, and worked out, I still wouldn’t be faster than some other guy on my own team.
And I would never be able to do any other strokes, either. Perhaps from genetics, or perhaps from all those formative years doing the frog kick, my ankles can bend sharply upward towards my shins, but go nowhere when I try to point my toes. This is a perfect position for skiing and breast stroking, but incredibly bad for freestyle – flutter-kicking. When using a kickboard ion the water, I can actually go backwards when kicking! This impresses small children, but does little for my stability or forward motion when swimming the crawl.
Then I found triathlon. It offers many advantages to the free-style challenged like myself. Most triathletes come to the sport from a cycling or running background, and are therefore even worse swimmers than I am. Wet suits are allowed in all but tropical waters. And speed matters much less than strength and endurance in the swim. All my years slogging back and forth in pools over the years, swimming breast stroke or pulling freestyle with a pull-buoy between my legs had made me impervious to water fears. I actually had a little advantage over my competition.
Fast forward to March, 2002. In keeping with my new philosophy that, as a triathlete, I’m not only a part-time bike and reluctant runner, but a dilletante swimmer as well. I signed up for the short course championships at the Weyerhauser pool up in Federal Way. Over three days, I could have my pick of races ranging from 25 to 1500 yards, in all strokes and the individual medley. Tempted as I was to try for the longer freestyle distances, I’d have no wet suit, no pull-buoy, and so my feet and legs would drag me down, resulting in a series of flip tuns punctuated by fruitless churning. No, it would have to be breast stroke only: 50, 100 and 200 yards.
For six weeks I added a few breast stroke sprints to my triathlon-centric workouts. In the three decades since I raced last, there had been a few innovations I doubted I could incorporate. First, racers now dive in with goggles on. How do they keep the goggles from either coming off or filling with water? I had no clue, and was afraid to try at my local pool, which has no starting blocks. Second, breast strokers snow seem to have much more up-and-down motions with their shoulders and heads, almost leaping forward like a dolphin with each stroke. What’s that all about? I mean, how does that translate into improved forward motion? Again I had no clue.
So, I’d just stick with what I knew: kick hard and pull water into my chest, creating a forward wave/splash with a reverse rooster tail shooting out in front every time a lift my head to breath. And, swim wit out goggles, meaning I’d be blind in the water.