Andrew Rutz's blog
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]
