On swimming.
“So, you’re one of those people who sit on a beach building sandcastles.”
Last month, I finished my first-ever competitive sporting event – the 2021 Pacific Masters Swimming Short Course Meters Championships (results below) at Heather Farm Park in Walnut Creek, CA, hosted by the Walnut Creek Masters, the local United States Masters Swim (USMS) team.
Back in my younger days, when we moved to Livermore when it was a sparse field of golden poppies, the towering, middle-aged athletic director Mr. B. in high school once glowered at me and wondered out loud how an “Islander” like me couldn’t swim. What could I say then? It was true that I was born and raised next to a river by the sea on a tropical island. It was also true that many islanders can’t swim. It was an activity that my parents discouraged, much of it was shrouded in fear. Mermaids, water snakes, and crocodiles. It’s hard to argue against creatures who devour children and don’t sing Disney musical numbers about wanting to be part of our world. Mr. B. promptly made a hapless girl named Jennifer B. “teach” me how to “swim” in the first chlorinated pool I had ever been in, and she made me kick and drink pool water for a few weeks. It was humiliating, and she could never look me in the eye for the rest of our school days.
Fast forward twenty-seven years, sometime in the spring of 2017, Danny, my then-boyfriend of two years, invited me to visit him at swim practice one day. He is a lifelong competitive swimmer and could swim for miles in open water. He trained at Laney College with MEMO (Marcia’s Enthusiastic Masters of Oakland) and that’s when I met Marcia Benjamin, the “M” in MEMO, a USMS-certified coach. She is arguably the best and one of the most qualified swim instructors at the college. She asked me if I swam, which I expected because Danny warned me that she would try to recruit me to the team. I politely said no.
“So, you’re one of those people who sit on a beach building sandcastles,” she said with a smile and a glint in her eye as she walked back to bellow at her team at a decibel level that I could best describe as diaphragmic.
I didn’t really know how to take the jibe. I didn’t know her. It wasn’t even a question. It was a tease that sounded like a statement of fact, and it was funny and somehow layered with sweet, buttery guilt and shame. When I told Danny about it, he laughed. “Aren’t you, though?” he concurred. That of all things triggered crunchy noises from the chips on my shoulder. Here I was now, middle-aged, probably the same age as that P.E. teacher was back then, more “athletic” than I ever was in my youth, and I couldn’t swim. So, I thought, okay, f**k you, and yes, you are correct. Whatever machination Danny had, I fell for it, and so right before I drove solo to the Burning Man Festival that summer, I took Marcia’s beginning swim class at Laney.
Being horizontal in a swimming pool, face submerged, felt terrifyingly unnatural. I spent that quarter mostly standing in three feet of water. If it wasn’t a pass-no pass class, I would have failed. I used fins as if my life depended on them.
In the fall, I took the class again this time comfortable enough to float and kick, but struggling to go from one end of the pool to the next. Marcia yelled at me more than once to “GET OFF THE goddamn WALL!” because it seemed like I was glued to it. She didn’t actually cuss, but she said WALL as if it had three syllables, so my auditory neural network inserted some version of a cuss word in the middle of the sentence.
I took the class one last time (one’s only allowed three tries) and finally managed to front crawl. My backstroke clicked when I imagined I was Esther Williams in a 1950s swimming ballet extravaganza; though, really, I feel more like Carol Burnett most of the time. There was no more swimming after that until I quarantined in Hawai’i last year.
Last June, I joined MEMO on a trial run. I needed to swim. My body ached for it, and I’m glad I did. I had no delusions that it was going to be fun. MEMO is not for the faint of heart. I did it to push myself. That’s when I learned the butterfly stroke after watching and imitating one of the swimmers. Then breaststroke, which I’m still sort of faking until I make it. I can’t frog kick, and yes, that’s just me whining. And I have yet to do a flip turn. I’ve never somersaulted in my life, so the sensation even in water is disorienting. I’m sure I’ll manage it when I least expect.
Swimming is physical and mental. The physical aspect of it is controllable by sedulous training. Then there’s my body, which literally does not distribute oxygen well at the cellular level, and for as long as I can remember, I get winded easily and have to fight for air harder to recover faster. I have to kick my brain to get past doubt, fear, and exhaustion. Find a rhythm. When I feel panic or anxiety, I tell myself Frank Herbert’s famous mantra in Dune, which I have read more than once:
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear … Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
I remained, and it was all worth it. The weightlessness. The glorious muffled silence of the outside world. I love swimming.*
*Thanks to Danny and Marcia. And yes, I still love building sandcastles.
2021 Pacific Masters Swimming Short Course Meters Championships
For the swim meet, I approached the competition fearful and clinical. I had three endpoints in mind: (1) Survival. Don’t drown and die and must be pulled out of the pool. (2) Completion. Don’t get disqualified; don’t stop in the middle of a race and drown (see #1); touch the wall on your back in backstroke. (3) Fun. Enjoy the meet. I wasn’t going to win anything; I wasn’t going to break records. I was there to compete with myself.
Three races completed: 50 m Backstroke, 200 m Relay, 50 m Freestyle.
Start of 50-M backstroke race
I got three ribbons and placed in my age group high enough to receive 30 individual points out of the 13K points that our team earned to win the championships. That is 0.23% of total.
The backstroke felt good but could have been better. I finished it at 1:09 minutes, faster than my initial average (seed time) of 1:20 minutes. I was hoping to go under 1 minute, but the turn was horrid as I was unsure how to do it right from my back at that moment and flailed and hit my toe on the wall. It hurt like a motherf****r. I also beat a 79-year old whose supposed to be faster than me. Hey, a win is a win, and we give no mercy!
The relay was fine, I swam the second leg, and unbeknownst to all, I did it with one eye open. My left goggle filled with water on dive impact. That was my second ever attempt in my life at a block dive.
The 50m freestyle overall was okay, too. Danny has a hilarious video of me executing a not-so-graceful-90-degree-dive-belly-flop, my third attempt from the block, that is so embarrassing and cringe-worthy, I can only laugh hysterically. In retrospect, I should have googled a how-to video. OR just started from the wall. I did it anyway, and I shaved off 25 seconds from my seed time of 1:20 to finish at 0:55.
Next swim meet in April!