Andrew Rutz's blog

Short Course Nationals, 2008

Well, it's over. One and a half years of planning and practice... and it's over. The 2008 USMS Short Course National Championships held at the University of Texas' Swim Center are now in the history books. (short course is a swimming term that means the pool is setup to be 25 yards in length (as opposed to a 50 meter pool, eg).

I injured myself a month before the meet, so I wasn't able to swim, but I was able to "see my name in lights":

I was head of the Registration committee, and I also worked as Head Timer on Saturday. There were 1865 USMS (Masters) swimmers from all around the country. There were all kinds of swimmers ... all the way from Olympians (eg, Josh Davis and Shaun Jordan) to "normal people" whose story might even make you cry.

I had entered the 100 yard breastroke, 100 IM, and 200 IM. The only digital record of my being there is this video of my heat in the 100 IM from floswimming.org. I use the term "video" loosely, as you will not SEE me in the video... you will only be able to hear the announcer say my name. By the way, for all you swimmers and swim-fans out there, floswimming.org is an amazing website that hosts the coolest swimming videos.

I can honestly say that I was bummed when the meet ended. I had so much fun being in that atmosphere.. and contributing to what many said was a wonderful meet. Thank you, Whitney, for helping me improve as a swimmer. 'Sorry that I could not get in that water and show my stuff :-)

Posted at 08:35PM May 10, 2008 by Andrew Rutz in Swim  |  Comments[0]

Unbelievable coach ...

Well, I just finished two months of one-on-one lessons with one of the best swim coaches I will ever have the pleasure of learning from. I went once or twice a week for a one-on-one, one-hour lesson with Rada Owen, who swam at Auburn University and earned a gold medal at the 2000 Olympic games.

We worked on all four strokes, and I was amazed at her "eye" for technique. She's known in the "swimming world" for having that skill, but it was a privilege to witness it and be a direct beneficiary of it.

I recorded notes after each session, and will refer to them in the future during my attempts at becoming a significantly better swimmer.

I liken Swimming to Golf. I was amazed at how difficult Golf was to learn. It took me eight years to become somewhat accomplished; I've already spent seven years at swimming. Each sport requires an unbelievable level of skill and technique. Each seems to be a "sport of opposites". Eg, if you want to hit the ball high in golf, you swing the club down. If you want the ball to go to the left, you make the club-head go to the right. If you want the ball to go far, you have to swing "easy". What looks like a game dominated by hands and arms... is actually a game that lives or dies based on one's footwork. Power does not come from the appendages; it comes from the body's core.

I have less dualisms for swimming, as I'm not an accomplished swimmer... but the issue of "core power" is patently true. ...and the idea about "swimming harder to go faster" is certainly not the way to go. Eg, it takes a smooth application of power to move through the water faster. A smooth application (eg, acceleration) of power in golf leads to a significantly more controlled and faster clubhead.

I know the deceptive elusiveness of these two sports has been what's caused them to grab my attention so deeply. I greatly thank Rada for helping me understand and to learn some more of the basics and intricacies of swimming.

Posted at 10:23PM Jun 30, 2007 by Andrew Rutz in Swim  |  Comments[0]

A swimming-first ...

...for someone who in terms of Time came in last. :-)

Well, I had an awesome time at the "Zones meet", even if my times weren't that fast.... but... hey... I did something I never ever thought would be on one of the stops in my Life's journey: I swam in an organized swim meet.

A swim meet is not just about the Swimming; it's about the people you meet... and I want to say I enjoyed spending time with Brad, and Bob, and Mary, and Sally, and Ed, and Henry, and Ande, and Jon, and Keelah... as well as our awesome coach, Whitney.

I also want to thank Ande Rasmussen, who took time out of his busy meet-schedule to show me some fundamentals on breaststroke-starts. Ande swam NCAA Division 1 at UT-Austin, is a polymath ;-), and has a website called swimfasterfaster.com. Thanks, Ande!

..and now... on to the ugly details... :-)

The above represents the first "organized swim" of my life, a 100yd individual medley (25yds of butterstruggle.... er, "butterfly"... 25yds of backstroke, 25 of breaststroke, and 25 of freestyle). I've worked a bunch of meets, so I kinda knew how it was all supposed to play out, so I had the "macro" thing going okay... it was just the details that all seem to get cloudy when one is "under the gun".

Time either slowed down, or there actually was a long pause due to some reason... but I had longer than I thought I'd have before I actually stepped onto the "block". It was kind of like what they say the transition of Death ;-) is like... that you see images flash by. Well, I played some of them back: my Mom sitting at the high school pool for what I think was three summers in a row... and me unable to decipher the biomechanical permutation of swimming... yet my Mom always encouraging me that I could do it... that I would "get it"... I thought of the summers in Laguna Beach... where I was afraid to take the "boogie board" past the first set of waves... because I didn't think I'd make it back... of how I never liked "swim parties" as a kid... cuz I "didn't know what to do".... I fast-forwarded to 1982-83.. when I road my bike two-hundred miles a week and ran 30-40 miles... how I'd watched the first televised Ironman competition from Hawaii... and how I'd thought that ONLY IF I knew how to swim... that some day I could make it there... and then there was 1984... and a new-found reason X:-) to learn how to swim... how I took a swim-class at UC Irvine and completed a mile as our final-exam... how I spent some lunches at Xerox in El Segundo swimming in a 40yd pool... and barely making it more than two laps without being exhausted.... how I swam on my own in Austin... five days a week... for two years...

..and then the sound that I'd only ever heard said for others: "Swimmers! take your mark!". ...and then the gun... and then an almost literal loss of sound when I broke the water's plane. I'd never had that feeling before. It was like I was in a dream... or at least what TV tries to portray as a dream ... or a "water world"... where someone is cut off from all sound. It was eery.. yet sublime. My dive had probably been too "steep", and so I had a ways to come up to "hit air"... but I actually swam butterfly in public... if only for 15 yards or so. I then touched with both hands... commenced the backstroke leg... yet fail to find anything to say about it here... as I don't remember anything about it :-). I can't say that I even remember anything distinctly about the breaststroke or "free" legs either, except that the waterline seemed much more turbulent than I'd expected.. and so I could not compare my position to others... which.. naturally... I used to brainwash myself into thinking I was near the lead in my heat.. and that.. therefore... many of the people were yelling for ME! :-) "...ah... Ignorance is bliss". Well, as can be seen from the above, I was the slowest in my age-group (eleventh place). I swam the butterfly and backstroke in a combined 47.24 seconds, and I needed 51.31 seconds to complete 25yds of breaststroke and 25yds of freestyle. ...but... I tell you... when I touched the wall... in my mind... I was out-touching Michael Phelps for "gold" at the Olympics.

It took me 47 years to swim those 100yds; the next 50yds were only an hour away...

...technically, they were one hour, forty-four seconds, and ninety-seven hundredths of a second away... ;-)...

What's NOT shown above is that for this heat I happened to be seeded in lane four, the position where the highest seed (within the heat) is seeded. I moved onto the block in lane four at the sound of the referee's first buzzer, and feelings of Irony replaced the feelings of Nostalgia that were generated by my first race. Here, the "slowpoke" of my age-group... ...by the "random walk" of Life is handed a "lane-four card"... and allowed the privilege to... ...at least until the "gun" went off... to look like he knew what he was doing.

I'm being hard on myself, but this race was fun, even though I tore a flap of skin off the "big toe" of my back foot when I pushed off from the blocks. I again dove too deep, and Ande later told me I have lots of room for improvement on my "underwater work" (eg, how far I travel under water after leaving each wall). I finished last in my heat and last in my age-group... but first in my personal pantheon of accomplishments ;-) A while after this heat, Ande worked with me for at least fifteen minutes on how to improve my underwater work. He looked so darn efficient when he was demonstrating what to do. There's a story passing around the UT swim-locker-room that Ande can swim to the bottom of the eighteen-foot-deep diving well and hold his breath for 15 minutes; I tried to go down to about twelve feet, and my ears felt like they were "giving up the ghost".

My last planned race was to be the 200 breaststroke:

I got to race next to a TXLA teammate, Robert Hughes, and he was giving me tips almost all the way out onto the bulkhead (the movable, spanning structure that straddles the entire width of the pool and that supports the weight of the blocks, timers, athelets, and officials). I was in lane eight, so I could only look to the left (eg, lane seven) to see any form of human life (eg, to see where I stood in relation to at least ONE competitor). Robert already had me by half a pool-length by the time Robert touched for his 50. I felt OK through the first 100, and then it hit me as to why they call it a "200"... because one has to swim 100 MORE yards!!! :-) My turns became even more ragged; I was too close to the water surface when pushing off the wall. Ande's assistance was useful, but it in no way had become "second nature" so soon.

However, the "2" in the right-most column in the above set of results means I earned TWO POINTS!!!! for the team! These are my first, official points ever won by myself in an organized meet!. Ok, Ok... I know... "settle down"... but... heh... I know I won them because the field was so small (eg, there weren't even eight competitors (in my age-group) for the 200-breast)... but... heh... "points is POINTS" ! :-)

...and, I have to apologize to Ed Coates for this, but I swam my last race using Ed's name. It was the 200-free-relay, and I wasn't scheduled to participate, but Ed's poor intra-day health led him to go home early... and allowed me to swim a relay. My relay-mates, Brad, Henry, and Robert, concluded I should lead off the relay, which would remove the chance of me disqualifying ("DQ'ing") the team due to mis-timing the "hand-off" between relay-mates. I led off with a "stellar" ;-) 37.54 for the 50-free. My goggles loosened as I broke the water-plane, and so I could not easily see the oncoming wall. It appeared to be close.. then far away.. then close... ...and I just thought of how stupid (and painful) it would be to misjudge the wall. I'd either run into it and crack my skull... or I'd do a flip-turn and having nothing to push off of. The touch-pads on each end of pool were neon-yellow, so there was no excuse regarding "visual target capability"... it's just that there was too much water inside my goggles. Luckily (and maybe due to the thousands of times I've done flip-turns after 25 strokes (uh... I mean... "yards") ;-) ... I guess one has a feel of where the wall should be. My water-angel was looking out for me. In any event, it REALLY is more fun swimming on a relay team; there's an amplification of the notion of Team; one wants to do well for the others.. not for one's self.

Well, that was my day at the University of Houston... at my first organized swim meet. I played the wrong sports in high school; my high school "do-over" would contain: "swimming, basketball, and golf" ... or "cross-country, swimming, and basketball"... or "swimming, basketball, and volleyball"... hmm... I guess I'm not going to solve that "do-over" now... so... I'll just focus on what I can do: and that's trying to improve at swimming.... NOW!

Oh yeah... here are the relay results:

I guess a "38-second fifty" was good enough to help TXLA score ten points! yowsa!

Posted at 07:20PM Mar 25, 2007 by Andrew Rutz in Swim  |  Comments[0]

What's wrong with this picture ?

Okay... this is assumedly the last time you'll ever see myself and who is currently deemed to be the greatest all-around swimmer in the world (Michael Phelps) on the same swim-deck at the same time.

I worked as a timer at the American Short Course Championships a couple years ago, and I most likely polluted :-) the intent of someone's picture by being in the line-of-sight with Michael :-)

Michael is in middle of pic, with one foot on track-stand, goggles on, and blue cap with the "C" (of "CW", for "Club Wolverine") showing. I am over his left shoulder, recording the time of the swimmer in my lane (Brendan Hansen, World record-holder in 100m and 200m breaststroke).

Posted at 12:17PM Mar 22, 2007 by Andrew Rutz in Swim  |  Comments[1]

Where I learned to drown, er, swim...

Here's the pool at UC Irvine where I learned how to swim the front crawl ("freestyle") and breaststroke. To be more precise, third lane from the right in the picture is where I "propulsed" myself in a swimmming-like-form from one end of the pool to the other... all without stopping. :-) ...but not without requiring the aid of several liters of pure oxygen after touching the far wall. ;-)

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Posted at 11:50AM Mar 22, 2007 by Andrew Rutz in Swim  |  Comments[0]

2007 South Central Zones meet

Well, my three failed attempts in the '60's (at learning how to swim) and my two recent years of "personal swimming" and my three more years of swimming on the UT Masters team have all led up to my first chance to swim in public.

I'll be swimming 3/23/07 at the 2007 South Central Zone Short Course Masters Championships, in Houston, Tx. I'll be swimming the 100yd IM (individual medley), 50 yd breaststroke, and 200yd breaststroke. If you find the "psych sheet" on the previous link, you can find my name and see that based on my seeding I'm not exactly going to "go home with all the hardware". :-) ..but... as they say... sometimes the key in Life is to make it to the Starting Line... not just the Finish Line.

A "Masters swim team" is a local chapter of the national swim club, United States Masters Swimming, which was started in the 1970's. The United States is partitioned into several zones, and Austin, TX is in the South Central Zone. Austin has several Masters swim teams, and my team swims at what people in the "swimming world" refer to as "Yankee Stadium". The Texas Swim Center is on the campus of UT-Austin, and is reknowned to be one of the five fastest pools in the United States; needless to say, I'm sure I help bring down the average ;-)

Posted at 10:51AM Mar 22, 2007 by Andrew Rutz in Swim  |  Comments[0]