Team Effort: Southern Pacific Masters Regional Championships

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.

Joy in the Water

After you’re born, movement is progress. You spend years improving your competence in mobility. I think that’s a secret beneath the joy of exercise. Exercise is movement. It makes you feel good because, deep down, it stimulates the joy of movement that you discovered when you were little and learning to be active in the world.

That’s true of hiking, running, swimming, and biking. My sport is swimming.

Swimming might seem weird to some people – especially pool swimming. They think that the scenery never changes. They see swimming as just going back and forth and back and forth.

But that point of view overlooks some things. Again, remember the downright joy of movement.

And often the scenery does change. As I swim, I spend a lot of time looking at other people in the pool. They are my scenery. I admire good swimmers. I critique strokes, something that I’m good at. Sometime I look at subtle things, like the position of someone’s head as they swim. Sometimes there’s an obvious need for improvement, like when people swim almost vertically.

As I swim, I admire fit swimmers – particularly the women.

I check out other people’s swimming equipment. Personally, I wear goggles and a swim suit, and I use a kickboard for part of my workout. But some people buy all sorts of swimming gear. Fins are common. It’s funny to see swimmers with big-ol’ fins that they do not need because they do not move their feet. Some people use snorkels. (Better for a reef in Hawaii.) Varieties of hand wear are not uncommon. They create more resistance for the arms, building muscle faster – but too much resistance can injure you!

Sadly, I used to see and resent the older folks who would amble up and down the lanes, talking with this or that friend. I thought that they were wasting valuable lane space. But I decided that any exercise is good exercise; and even though they don’t get much exercise (they never seem to tire), I can’t say that they get no exercise. And these are old guys who fought in wars and raised children and held down jobs until they retired. If they want to stroll through the water in their years of rest, good.

The greatest joy that I get from swimming is the sense that I do it well. My parents put me on a swim team when I was seven. I swam competitively until I was 18. I was on a masters’ team in Pasadena years ago, and the coach gave me good tips.

So I know what I’m doing in the water.

And after a two-year cycle, I’m strong. I swim 2,700 yards in a workout. (That’s the length of 27 football fields.) Other people swim farther, but that’s still a decent distance. And 850 yards of that is butterfly.

When I finish a workout, I feel like I’ve accomplished something that a lot of guys my age couldn’t do, or wouldn’t do. That’s pride, that’s vanity, but it’s also a source of self-confidence.

I’m vain enough that I like it when people compliment my swimming. My friend Bob is somewhere upward of 74. He’s in great shape. We swim at the same pool. He compliments my butterfly.

And sometimes I’ll greet the young lifeguard before jumping in the pool (they change from day to day). She might reply with obvious bored indifference. After all, I’m 55. But sometimes – sometimes – after I’ve worked out in front of her, she’ll be friendlier. I’m not immune to indirect complements.

Swimming does me good. I might be stressed; a workout soothes me. I might be tired; swimming energies me. I might have a problem; laps sometime bring a solution.

Lately, I’ve competed at masters’ meets. The difference between me at a swim meet at 17 and me at a swim meet at 55 is this: when I was 17, I worried about my races. But now, races are 99.98% pure fun. Sure, I want to do well. But I have perspective now.

And I’m learning, or re-learning. I’m learning when to push and when to pace myself. And when I go out too fast, I learn to gut it out, stroke by stroke, until I touch the wall at the end of the race.

And I’m making friends at the swim meets.

We older Americans usually don’t get much exercise. And sometimes there seems to be no time to work out. But if you do, it rewards you.

It doesn’t have to be swimming. It can be hiking, it can be running, it can be a good walk around your neighborhood. It can be dancing.

My best advice is twofold.

First, pace yourself. When I started, I went short distances. I worked up to my present distance over two years. It’s easier to go from – say – one-thousand yards to two-thousand yards, than it is to go from zero yards to one-thousand yards. You have to understand that, and you have to pace yourself.

That’s true because a lot of short, easy workouts over a long period are better than a long, hard workout that exhausts you so much that you don’t do it again. So be patient with yourself. And be realistic about what you can do.

Second, find a sport that you like. As I said, I like to swim, and I’ve been good at it for a long time. But some people like to lift weights. Others like to hike. I know lawyers who are fanatics about racquetball. Golf is popular. Or biking. Or aerobic classes. When my brother Peter exercises, he runs on a treadmill. My brother Erik learned soccer when he was young, and he enjoys playing it to this day.

Find your sport. You won’t necessarily like what your friends like, but if you find your sport, you’ll keep at it.