The Raging Elitist

I’ve heard some people referred to as “human dynamos” in regards to their ability to get things done. My mother is pure TNT. While she was in town caring for my sister after her neck surgery, she spurred me to investigate a new meet format that circumvents South Carolina Swimming’s sanctioning process. The General Chair was so outraged when it was brought to his attention that he came close to physically attacking my club’s Head Coach and ultimately resigned a few days later. Mom had a similarly explosive impact while helping me out on deck with practice. I was reluctant at first, but over the course of six weeks, I came to depend on her handling a portion of my younger group. This dependency had its pros and cons. After a visiting high school team’s staff berated me on the pool deck, Mom wrote a blistering email to my boss about the environment where I work, and her contribution to teaching the kids whistle starts was included in a crazed lifeguard’s complaint about me to HR. Ironically, all the trouble led to me getting a pay raise. Mom is no stranger to the kneejerk email or the off-the-cuff retort; she’s not one to shy away from a pitched battle and is more than capable of digging her heels in. She mentioned on one of her last days here that she read somewhere revenge is responsible for an unexpectedly large amount of human motivation. After a rocky six weeks to begin the latest short course swim season that was significantly affected by Mom’s combative but effective influence, I wondered what was motivating my inordinate effort around the pool.

Fifteen hours a week on deck might not sound like a lot, but that’s before you figure there’s an extra twenty-five or so hours a month spent at swim meets and another five or six a week on planning and another two or three on emails, phone calls, and meet entries. And just as the hours pile up, so does the stress that comes from dealing with other programs, squeaky wheel parents, and less than brilliant fellow aquatics employees. Most of a club coach’s exertion goes unnoticed, and the pay isn’t great to say the least. It’s easy to forget the noble reasons one might have had for getting started and to get caught up in the never-ending series of available battles and reasons for revenge seeking. Such failure to block out the noise can get exhausting.

After Mom’s last day at the pool, I came home and lay on the living room floor so that Sammy would press her head against me like she was trying to roll me over, and the boys would come and gather round. Cartter came over first and started hitting me with questions about a book lying on the coffee table, The Tao of Pooh, while Scotty periodically turned around in his chair at the kitchen table, taking small breaks from his drawing while I did my best to explain the Tao to Cartter. Once he joined us, Scotty said that he didn’t want April to come, that he wanted to stay seven and live forever. Cartter said his brother would be sorry when the world ended and he was left floating in space all alone. This notion of being trapped in life resonated more deeply than I imagined. Later that night, I’d have a dreamed that I was aboard a tiny, one-man spacecraft with no windows, panicked, floating in the infinite abyss with no way out and no hope of ever being rescued.

“Why do people swim?” Cartter asked once he was in bed with the lights out. I said there were lots of reasons and asked him why he swam. “I don’t know,” he said. “Because you want me to?” I told him he didn’t have to swim because of me, and he said, “It’s not like I’m gonna be able to swim in college.” I told him that wasn’t necessarily true, that although my career got derailed and I didn’t swim in college, I’d been faster than a lot of college swimmers. “Like who?” he asked, and I named some. I told him I really liked having him on my team, that it was nice for me, and he said, “Why?”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE MY SON, AND I LOVE YOU,” I said.

When I moved over to Scotty’s room, his first thought was that he’d be sad when Sammy was gone. Sammy was standing in the hall outside his bedroom with a ball in her mouth, and I was making moves with my hand to excite her so that she dropped her prize and dared me to go for it.

“I will be too,” I said, and Sammy lay down facing the doorway, resting her face on the floor between her front paws, sad that no one would chase her. Scotty settled back into his bed, no longer leaning over the rail to look at her.

“She won’t be, though,” I added.

“Why not?” said Scotty from under his blankets.

“She’ll be dead,” I said looking at her, and she thumped her tail once on the floor without changing her sad expression.

“Where will she go?” Scotty asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Where dead things go.” Which I can only hope is not aboard that tiny spaceship.

Mind Control

There’s a girl in my top group of athletes who has a way of talking herself out of things. She’s a talented thirteen-year-old with a lot of potential and a habit of shying away from more challenging sets and longer races. Every time I try to steer her out of her rambling rationalizations that the easy way out is the only available option, she immediately finds a fresh excuse. Last night before a distance freestyle main set, the kids were resting with their elbows propped on the wall, and this particular girl said she hadn’t eaten much all day and that she probably wasn’t going to do well. Then, she added that with the clocks having just been rolled back an hour, her brain thought it was supposed to be done already.

“You have to tell your brain what to think,” I said from above her lane.

She looked up from the water at me smiling and kind of shrugged as she said, “It has a mind of its own.”

I had to hand it to her: it was a good line, one that sums up so much of what is difficult about swimming and endurance sports in general. Just minutes beforehand, I had wrapped the younger kids’ practice with a little speech about overriding the myriad automatic defense mechanisms their brains deploy to slow them down unnecessarily. Case in point: their brains tell them they can’t push off streamline underwater, that they need to angle toward the surface and go straight to air, but it simply isn’t true. Nobody protested, but certainly, several of those swimmers’ bad habits off the wall will continue to manifest. That’s because unfortunately, this business about not needing so much air is one of those things that a person can know without fully believing. From my vantage point on the deck, an extra second or two of aerobic discipline ought to be quickly attainable, but lots of kids in the water struggle to get past the panicked sensation of “needing” that first breath immediately. Their little brains have minds of their own.

As an athlete I was very adept at conquering my brain’s wayward thoughts during training. I reduced seemingly interminable threshold sets to manageable tasks by mentally carving them into pieces, telling myself that if I could get through the first part, I’d be on my way; during the second part, I’d think of how once I made it to the third part, the fourth and final part would be next, and then I’d be finished. Always, I counted – strokes, laps, sendoffs – and always, I targeted specific points in the set that weren’t so bad. In this way, thoughts like “This interval is impossible,” and “This hurts too much” were drowned out, and things I didn’t fully believe I could do, got done. At practice, my brain might have tried to have a mind of its own, but I was its master.

Meets were a different story. As a young swimmer, I would lay awake for hours in the nights leading up to a meet, filled with a sense of dread at the ordeal to come, tortured by the possibility of failure. My mind would run on and on until sometimes, I would get physically ill. Negative thoughts ruled my consciousness around meet time, and I was ashamed to admit to anyone how panicked and afraid I was.

My nine-year-old shares some of my difficulty in maintaining self-control in the leadup to competition. Fortunately, he’s more honest about it. The night before his first true year-round meet, he called me back to his room after bedtime, as he is wont to do, and started asking lots of questions – How many people will be there? Which events are tomorrow? Will his friend be there? How will he know when to go? What if he misses his event? What if he gets a state time? What if he doesn’t? – I took each of these one at a time, hoping to find the right answers that would ease his worried mind and let me leave the room. Realizing that as much as he was seeking information, my boy was checking me for cues, looking to see if I might get upset with him, I finally relented and climbed into his bed. As I did, he let out a sigh and said, “I’m just scared.” A few minutes later, he was asleep. Maybe, if I had told someone those three little words when I was an anxiety-ridden swimmer, I would have saved myself a lot of suffering. Maybe a similar confession by my Senior Two girl would help get her mind under control.

Meet Results

The boys did admirably in their first ever year-round meet. Multiple parents on the team commented to me on how impressed they were. Cartter swam seven events and recorded a time in all but one. He was just off the state qualifying time in both backstrokes, and a 1:34 in his first ever sanctioned 100 IM was a bright spot. The low point was his 100 breast on Saturday. It was the last event of the day, and he was well on his way to a flawless session when he dove in and started zigzagging across the lane, swimming with his face up, looking like a wounded duck. He was in the end lane, right next to me and a group of coaches. “What’s happening?” I said.

Fabio, a Myrtle Beach coach and former Brazilian national swimmer in the 200 breast figured it out first. “His eyes are closed,” he said. “His goggles filled up.” A mom on the team who was volunteering as an official hung her head and pursed her lips in a sympathetic smile when on the second twenty-five Cartter reached up and tried to adjust his goggles. I looked over in time to see her raise her hand and disqualify him. Only right that something go wrong.

“I’m just glad that most of the people had left by then,” Cartter said that night when he called me into his room after bedtime. I tried to reassure him that nobody cared and told him he just needed to tighten his goggles up. He took my advice, but not enough. In the first swim the next day, the third leg of a 4×50 relay, he again zigzagged from lane line to lane line, and I wondered how long this was going to be a recurring issue, if perhaps, now that he’d managed to fill his goggles up on the dive the one time, he’d never be able to avoid it again. When he came over after his race, I asked him if he tightened his straps. He said yes, and I said, “Let me see,” noting how easily he took them off and then putting them on my adult-man-sized head. “Look at this!” I said. “They’re not even that tight on me!” He laughed just a little at his foolishness; I removed about two inches of slack; and when he stretched the strap around his head and the lenses suctioned hard into his eye sockets, I asked, “You think those are gonna come off?”

“No,” was his simple answer. And they didn’t.

Scotty’s meet was much easier. He swam a twenty-five of each stroke, two each day, covering in total the same distance that Cartter swam in just one of his seven events. Scotty’s events started from the bulkhead in the middle of the pool, so he didn’t have the benefit of the numbers on the starting blocks helping him know where to go. He probably didn’t know what lane he was supposed to be in anyway. Before one event he walked all the way to the wrong side of the bulkhead before a volunteer turned him around and led him back to where he was supposed to be.

After his backstroke, he came over to where the coaches stood, excited to share a surprising discovery: he’d forgotten to take off his underwear and had swum the entire session with them underneath his suit. They were blue and white striped.

Finally, at the end of a weekend-long slog, Scotty walked the deck with a container of shark-shaped sugar cookies prepared by his mother and handed them out to all the coaches and volunteer officials. I was particularly pleased when one official, eight-time Olympic gold medalist Jenny Thompson, expressed her approval. “Did you make these?” she asked, and then, “Can I have another one?”