The Southern Pacific Masters had their regional swimming championship on November 30 through December 2, 2012 in Long Beach. I swim with the San Diego Swim Masters. We took first place.
1. Strivers and coasters.
Some swimmers on the team are very dedicated, very skillful, and very fast. Some of these swimmers carried stress at times during the meet. These stress-carriers tend to be the high performers, but not necessarily all of the high performers. (It’s a big team; I don’t yet know everyone.)
I’m toward the low-intensity end of the spectrum. We range, though I would say we tend toward the striving end.
2. Roles.
Different people on the team have different roles; some have several. These showed in the meet.
We have a relay czar. He devised a brilliant program that uses a database of team-member times to craft relay lineups. This program maximizes our chances of winning relays. Relay victories were a profound part of our overall success at the meet.
We have our exhorters who encourage others. We have smart people who share tips on stroke-technique and racing-technique.
We have our champions, the ones who always do spectacularly; the ones who qualify for the yearly national masters meet; the ones who hold records.
We have our folks who are good to hang with.
And everybody contributes points to the final outcome. Everyone fills out the team.
3. Aging up.
Those of us who do not routinely place high at championships get satisfaction by competing against our previous times. If we improve over a prior time, we’re glad.
This improvement can’t be taken for granted. When you compete when you’re a child, moving up to a new age group is a fraught event, because suddenly you are competing against older children who have had more time to develop strength and skill. That puts you at a relative disadvantage, which you overcome in time, until you age up again.
It’s different with we older swimmers. Aging up is a good thing, because aging up means competing against folk who are, well, getting older. People always seem glad when they’re about to age up.
But this gladness exploits our universal habit of slow decline. So in the midst of the vigor that our workouts and our competition represent, in the midst of our celebration of strength and skill – and these are joys – there is this whispered reminder of mortality.
I don’t know why someone hasn’t done a video documentary on masters swimming. The season goes year-round. They could start in the spring, and focus on the younger swimmers. They could follow the meets into the fall, and focus on the older swimmers. It would be a film of effort and joy in the passing of seasons.
Some swimmers compete into their nineties. They even compete in distance events, like the 1500 meters freestyle (a race of almost a mile). They compete even when someone else needs to stand next to them at the starting block for them to hold onto to steady themselves.
You see in these meets a strand, a sense of turning the clock back. In the fact of competition itself, in the physical effort, we older swimmers invade the prerogative of youth. This turning-back also shows in a sometime-sense of playfulness. Some of the seasoned women on the Las Vegas team wore to keep warm knitted caps patterned after animals. I told one woman that I liked her pink pig with its purple nose.
4. Olympic hero.
Olympic heros show up. This year it was Matt Biondi, an Olympic champion from the Olympics of 1984, 1988, and 1992. Word spread that this swimming standout-great would be at the meet.
He swam in the 50 meters butterfly and 50 meters freestyle. People left their seats to stand and watch from the deck as he stood behind his starting block, ready to race. Some people were surprised at how lanky he was.
In both of his races, he raced in the last heat, which is the fastest heat. In those heats, he raced against much younger men. He didn’t win his heats, but he lost only by one-or-two tenths of a second. In the butterfly, he was 6/100th of a second off the world record for his age group. Wikipedia calls him a "former competition swimmer", but someone should change that.
5. Triumphs.
I was on two first-place relay teams. Before winning my relay-team medals, I happened to compliment a teammate when I saw two medals dangling from their neck-bands in his hand. He was dismissive: "They’re only for relays".
This is a guy who’s been generous to me with suggestions for my stroke technique, so I know that he has an interest in others. But he seemed to – seemed to – embrace the common idea that only personal glory really matters. Some people live by, "Don’t touch my things." I prefer the old-time, American national motto: e pluribus unum ("out of many one"). So I will be glad of my relay-team medals.
While a teammate videotaped us, in imitation of Olympic glory, I stood with two of my winning relay-teammates with our medals around our necks, and we sang The Star Spangled Banner. (Our fourth had left.) One of us seemed to mumble the words; well, he's Canadian. One of us started chorus-line kicking to the national anthem, so I joined him in that. Then, with my free hand, I pantomimed the words. The singing showed poor planning – we started singing in a middle register, which was catastrophic on the high notes.
That video is now posted to Facebook. It’s amusing. But since many Americans are deadly serious about our national anthem, it pretty much guarantees that I can never run for public office. At least not in a district where people lack a sense of humor.
6. An embarrassment.
Personally, I was happy with some of my times, but the meet was not an un-alloyed triumph, even by my modest standards. I was disqualified in the 400 meters individual medely.
The error was on my backstroke leg. The modern backstroke flipturn involves rolling onto your stomach before the wall and flipping to plant your feet on the wall, then pushing from the wall, once again on your back. This is new to me – we didn’t do it that way when I was a kid. Apparently, you have to start your flip immediately after you roll onto your stomach. I glided too long before starting the flip.
The next leg was breaststroke, and as I swam it, I happened to see the referee at the foot of my lane, writing on my entry sheet. I finished the race, but I dialed back my effort after I saw that I had come to the referee’s attention.
It wasn’t a happy moment to be disqualified; but it didn’t crush me like it would have many decades ago. That’s one of the benefit of being a low-intensity swimmer. Or just being older. Fortunately, the high-intensity swimmers tend to avoid the mistakes that we low-intensity folks make. They tend to.
7. Gathering with friends.
It’s a joy to compete with a team. It’s camaraderie; it’s mutual encouragement and aid; it’s shared success and shared happiness. It’s spending time with people from different backgrounds and different national origins and with different ideals. I like my teammates, and I wish them well in life.
I support all 8 of your 7 points.
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