On the morning I enter the water in Curaçao—my first workout in a rectangle fifty meters long—I understand why it’s called an infinity pool. The barely visible far wall seems planted in another hemisphere. Olympians demolish this distance in roughly twenty-five strokes (that’s left one, right two, left three, and so on). I will be lucky to triple that. I am in the Doug Stern pool at Lion’s Dive and Beach Resort, an unpretentious, aquacentric hotel that has become a familiar home to my group. The adventure was begun several decades ago by Stern, a gifted New York coach who was, by all accounts, a born teacher, a deeply inspiring leader, a guy who could make anyone a better swimmer and a better person. The boom in triathlons brought him waves of talented runners and cyclers eager to learn, or perfect, that third leg. His charisma brought them back year after year. Although Stern died in 2007, the winter tradition continues in the pool now named for him, with many of his followers, two other swim instructors, and a few first-timers.
We begin with pyramids—increasing sets of fifty, one hundred, up to two hundred meters, then down again. We do one-armed drills to improve our pull then kickboard lengths to get the legs going. We work on endurance by breathing every stroke, then every third stroke, then—well, I still can’t do that part of it for long. I thought I had breathing down—it is, after all, something I’ve been doing for a lot of years—unconsciously on land, with barely a thought in the water. Turns out, you need to think about it. “Swimming is the only sport where you have to actively focus on when you do breathe, or else bad things happen,” says Scott Bay, coach chair for US Masters Swimming. In a telephone conversation several months later, he tells me that the problem starts when “we’re taught, at a really early age, to take a deep breath and hold it, then go underwater. We tend to stick with that all of our lives.” The consequences can be very disruptive. “If you hold your breath for just half a second,” Bay goes on, “you’re flexing all your muscles in your core, especially the diaphragm, just to hold that breath. And every time you flex a muscle, it’s going to burn some oxygen. So those core muscles are burning oxygen for fuel, taking oxygen out of the blood stream rather than putting it in.” And depriving the muscles that need it to swim. “Don’t hold your breath,” he advises. “Slowly exhale when your face is in the water. You want to try to breathe as normally and rhythmically as possible.”
Not too normally. Once, during a USMS class when we are doing “lungbusters”—lengths of the pool underwater, without breathing, to increase our endurance—I find myself so relaxed, feeling so “normal” as I glide along, with the pretty, pale blue tiles beneath me, I momentarily forget I am human and try to breathe in. When my nonexistent gills don’t function, I shoot up to the surface to gulp some air. In extreme cases, that’s called shallow-water blackout and can be deadly. With me, it was just dumb.
Back in Curaçao, I can’t say I’m having fun yet. Can’t figure out why I’m doing racing sprints when I’m just trying to improve my long-distance performance. Turns out, learning to go fast complements tweaking your technique. You need to do both. And within a day or so I am feeling more comfortable—still lagging behind most, but sometimes swimming alongside or ahead of a few others. Our patient but very persistent coaches, Boris Talan and Vlad Bartchouk, best buddies from their time as Russian swim stars, pinpoint my challenges: I need to curve my wrists downward, soften my left leg, and break the water slightly in the kick. But I am learning. And yes, Boris agrees, I have a very strong breaststroke.
The folks in my lane, and the lanes next to us, are nothing but supportive. They are also remarkably diverse: from Eastern Canada to the Northwest Coast; from Michigan and Maryland and Brooklyn, New York. They are men and women, with and without mates, from their thirties to their late seventies. Only a few fit the body type of the pros. There is a veterinarian, an advertising executive, a government manager, a sculptor, two retired schoolteachers. And while they are all very proficient in the water and attached to it, they don’t always love it unconditionally.
“I think swimming hurts too much. You have to work so hard at it,” confesses Irene Pawley-Kennedy, forty-four, a slender, energetic former gymnast who only started swimming in 2001. But she’s happy to put in the work, teaching high school and age-group swimming and using her strong stroke in long-distance competitions in the lakes of Michigan. She’s here with her husband, Andy, a beefy six foot two with a monster kick behind his powerful freestyle. At dinner one evening after our afternoon ocean swim—a taxing hour in rolling swells that had me gasping despite the fins strengthening my kick—Irene and Andy joke about how much fun it was to time their strokes to the waves. I think how nice it would be to have that much control.
For many of these swimmers, it is less a sport than a discipline, less a workout than a way of life. Malonnie Kinnison, a radiologist, is a champion cyclist and triathlete who has been swimming since she was an infant. “Swimming was like life,” she tells me. “It was different every day. You’d have days where you’d own the water; it was just there for you. Other days it was just like swimming in mud.” Was that about you or the water?, I ask. “Me!” she responds. “Swimming is the way you see yourself, your life. It’s just the way you look at it. It could all be working, and you hope that day will be race day.
“Air,” she goes on, “doesn’t do it—but in water, you’re totally surrounded by the medium. Especially when everything is working. You’re just gliding along, and you say, ‘Wow, this is it!’” She thinks what sets swimming apart is the breathing. “You really get into it because you have to. It’s a matter of life or death. You can run without thinking so much about it. But you cannot swim without controlling your breath. It’s the breath of life.”
Or the breath of peace. Sara Widenhouse is here from North Carolina. She learned to swim as a child in the chilly sea off Rhode Island and then gave it up when she moved south to the mountains. But after her son turned two, she started doing laps again and discovered, “Wow! It’s quiet in the pool! It was like a big time-out.” Swimming also saved her during a recent bout with a very rare form of appendix cancer. “When I was going through chemo, swimming counterbalanced the hours of being tied to a drip,” she tells me. “It was like a prize, a dream that kept me going. It made me feel like I was winning.” When I speak with her after our trip, she is even more grateful. “It was an amazing gift. I shed my patient issues and did things I did not know I was capable of. Swimming makes me feel like I’m really living the life I want. It’s the most rewarding activity I do, and it’s helped me physically, emotionally, and spiritually.”
Nothing stops them. Judy Reibert, a former New York cable TV executive, once swam down the Hudson River and nearly found herself on the way to Wall Street because the currents almost kept her from hitting the landing spot. Kate Pennell, an advertising manager who also corrals the unruly gang with verve and efficiency, encountered a clear, round jellyfish during a swim to Malta that gave her a scar lasting seven months. Ray Plotecia, a former surfer (and Malonnie’s husband), found his first triathlon swim, in the Severn River at Annapolis, terrifying: “The guns go off; there are hundreds of people thrashing about; it’s as if you’re surrounded by piranha. I couldn’t put my face in the water. Could I go back to shore? The distance—half a mile out, half a mile back—looked huge. But I did the breaststroke, eased in the crawl, and made it. Then I realized I could do anything.” He has since completed the Ironman/Hawaii five times.
Another of my swim campmates is Dr. Oliver Sacks, the brilliant author and neurologist. To this group, he’s Oliver the swimmer—the onetime West Coast weightlifting champ whose diminished physique at seventy-seven has not restrained his enthusiasm for the activity he loves most in the world. He has been a water baby (his term) since childhood and has written and spoken eloquently on “the essential rightness about swimming. . . . I never knew anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant,” he’s said. In Curaçao, Oliver is more fragile than he’d like but shows up for every drill and ocean outing. And when he slips into the water, he is very strong indeed. One afternoon while we are snorkeling together, a rare free-swim in the arms of a secluded cove, he tells me, “I wish I could spend my life in the water. I feel much more confident here.” Later, after reading a passage aloud from one of his books to the group gathered around him on the beach—an annual rite that captivates everyone—he talks about his newest swimming milestones: “A longer stroke,” he announces. “And bilateral breathing. For a year it seemed so artificial—now it feels natural. One year.” The lesson? “The plasticity of the human brain. You can teach an old dog new tricks. You continue to learn until you die.”
Ithink about that the next day, as I am about to leave Curaçao to return home: my arms are aching, my shoulders stiff. It is the first time I have ever hurt from swimming, which means I am doing something either very right or very wrong. I like to think it’s the former, that by pushing my body to explore a more intense form of this activity, I am discovering more about myself.
One of the swimming professors at Indiana told me he likes the tough Masters workout because “the social component makes you work harder. In rest periods, you’re lane pals, and it makes it a much better experience. I am,” he says, “happy in my lane.” I mention that I’m not, that the faster swimmers are frustrating to me, that being passed is very humbling. “So is parenting,” he says.
There it is again: swimming as life. You may never get either one totally right. But you can, as Oliver Sacks says, always learn.
Liquid Silk
Syndicated health columnist Judy Foreman, who did her first flip turn at fifty-nine, placed sixth in the fifty-meter backstroke at the 2011 US Masters Nationals meet in Mesa, Arizona, at the age of sixty-seven. The competition would have been unthinkable a little over a decade ago. “I had just left the Boston Globe,” she recalls. “And I missed the camaraderie. So I joined USMS and started swimming three days a week, at noon. The first year or so it took courage: it was so intense. I swam in the slow lane—still do—with snorkel and flippers. I thought, ‘When is this workout going to be over?’ Now I find it delightful to have something physical that I’m getting better at.” Water, she says, is “liquid silk.” Swimming is “the only place I feel valued for being old.” At Nationals, she was invigorated as much by the crowd as by the race. When it was over, “everybody, the whole 1,800 of us, stood and cheered for some ninety-year-old guy who finished his race!”
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