My Brush With Athletic Greatness

I should start off by saying that I am phenomenally uncoordinated.

At the age of five, I was drummed out of my ballet/tap class by the stern but kind teacher who said, “I’m afraid there’s not much we can do with her,” to my mother right in front of me as she refunded the not unsizable tuition.

The major issue was that I could not do one thing with my legs and feet and another thing with my arms and hands . I had to pick one set of appendages at a time, which made me look like a jerky dance robot doll who had a problem with her timing mechanism. I blame it on the Celtic part of my background- there is a reason that during all that stomping and clogging footwork of Irish dance that the arms and hands hang straight at the sides, don’t you think?

I didn’t blame my dance teacher, because I was tired of spinning uncontrollably into the full length mirrors anyway. But this left my parents with the quandary of finding some morsel of talent or aptitude in me for any activity they could support and encourage and get me out of their hair for a few hours a week while I attended classes or training sessions.

My parents were both athletic; my father had been a senior lifeguard and ace skier and my mother was the female jock of the century in her little hometown in Illinois where she played softball and field hockey. They must have both been mystified when all their combined genes relating to agility, grace, speed and strength had been somehow mislaid or left out in their progeny, me.

I was completely satisfied with being a pasty, agoraphobic smartypants bookworm holed up in my bedroom with the latest Nancy Drew, an activity that was interrupted on a regular basis as I was ejected into the outdoors and sunlight with an injunction to play with the other kids or risk getting “rickets”. Even informing my parents that rickets was largely a malady of their own Depression era childhood and had been mostly eliminated with the addition of vitamin D in milk, had no sway. Fortunately, no real physical skills were required in the games we played as kids and I was able to happily blend into the herd of the unexceptional during sessions of Red Rover or Freeze Tag.

It was on a summer vacation at a “dude ranch” (I’m not making that up), which was a ski resort off-season that marketed trail riding and and a pool, that my parents found what they believed to be my latent super ability — swimming. My father was coaching me in the Australian crawl and announced that I was a natural and that I had perfect form. Which I did. I swam up and down the length of the resort’s pool to his increasing approbation. I was the next Gertrude Ederle (go ahead, look it up, it might be a Final Jeopardy some day).

When we got home, we all just couldn’t be happy that we had a good time and that I had improved my crawl technique, oh no, my swimming prowess had to be kept up and I had to be groomed for greatness. My mother discovered that a local swimming team, one of the best in the region, was holding try-outs for new members and “we” were going to try out. I had no desire to be on a swim team, but that small point got lost in the shuffle.

On the appointed day, we arrived at the pool where the team was holding try-outs. The first thing I noticed was that the pool was the biggest I had ever seen; it was an official Olympic sized pool. It made the dude ranch pool seem Lilliputian in comparison- three laps of the dude ranch pool would have been about a half lap in this over-sized behemoth. I had my first inkling that things were about to go horribly wrong.

The swim team coaches separated the aspirants by age and I was in with the other nine to twelve year-olds, which group they assigned some catchy name like the “porpoises” or something. In my head the more appropriate name, at least for myself, was “future corpse”.

A coach took all the Porpoises to the end of the pool and lined us up in the start position. He explained that our first test would be a sprint. We were all to swim a single length of the pool as fast as we could. I relaxed a bit. I thought that I could complete this first task. And I did. Believe it or not, I was the first of the group to touch the other side of the pool, well ahead of the other Porpoises. I exulted in my victory for a brief moment. Swimming that one lap of the giant pool made for titans had taken every ounce of energy I had stored in my bony body along with all spare resources and any potential future resources for the coming week.

I may have had speed, I may have had grace and good technique, but I was lacking in one vital component of a competitive swimmer — stamina. I would be lucky if I could muster enough strength to walk out of the facility on my own two feet back to the family car in order to escape this aquatic hellhole. I knew what I had to do, and I did it.

I walked back to where the parents were sitting and assumed a hunched over posture, clutched my abdomen and announced to my mother that I was taken with sudden, horrible, gut-wrenching cramps and could complete no more trials and had to be evacuated post haste before I threw up or worse. A coach was standing nearby and overheard me and told my mother that for me it was over; they would not take the risk of any human befoulment of their 2 million gallons of chlorinated water as the sanitizing process was long, cumbersome and expensive.

I walked out of the pool facility like a wounded gladiator who had dispatched the first lion easily, but who then had to reluctantly leave the field of combat to his comrades. I doubt that gladiators could remove themselves from fights to the death due to “cramps”, but that is one of the glories of our modern age.

Later that night my mother regaled my father with a long proud narrative of how I had bested the other swimmers in the sprint due to my superb technique and what a tragedy it was that my ascent into aquatic stardom had been aborted by eating a Ding Dong within half an hour of entering the water. I smiled both regretfully and wistfully, but was internally ecstatic that I could now return to my established bedroom mode of living, surrounded by books and potato chips.

I lived under the happy illusion that all had returned to normal until three days later when my mother got a call from the head coach of the swim team. He told her that my one lap sprint time was the fastest for my age group they had ever timed. In light of this fact and the fact that no child should have their dream withheld due to a single errant Ding Dong, I was invited to attend the next practice session of the team at their outdoor facility and I might still make the cut under a special circumstances proviso they had for qualifying.

My nightmare had not ended. Even though I begged and even resorted to telling the truth, that my cramps had been a subterfuge based on the primal instinct of self-preservation, my parents insisted that I follow through with a second session. They told me that I simply lacked confidence, that I didn’t believe enough in my self and that I had no idea how far my natural swimming ability might take me in life.

So back we went to another pool where I stood next to a group of kids my age who were all veteran swim team members. I couldn’t help but notice that they were toned and lithe and all seemed to have enormous shoulders. They were laughing and jumping up and down and shaking out their arms as if they simply couldn’t wait to immerse themselves in the blue expanse. I would not have been surprised if some of them were on the Darwinian forefront of gill development and webbed feet. I did notice that they all sported nose plugs.

I did not have nose plugs. This small, seemingly unimportant fact, actually played a large factor in why I did not evolve into another Diana Nyad or Amanda Beard and why I did not become famous and have my face on a Wheaties box. I am unknown and earthbound for lack of nose plugs, exactly in the same way of the old bromide that for lack of a nail the shoe was lost, for lack of the shoe, the horse was lost, for lack of a horse, the soldier was lost, the army was lost, the nation was lost. It’s those small things that will sink you in the end.

The coach blew a whistle and announced that their first exercise would be developing kick-turn technique. We were to dive into the pool, swim three strokes, do an underwater somersault, surface, swim three strokes, do an underwater somersault, surface, swim three strokes, etc. Simple, right?

In reality what I did was: swim three strokes, do an underwater somersault, get a nose full of water, sink to the bottom, kick off from the bottom, surface, gag and gasp, swim three strokes, do an underwater somersault, get a nose full of water, etc. repeat. Thank God the exercise started in the shallow end with a bottom to kick off of to regain the surface. The moment the bottom fell away and the pool got deeper and there was no bottom to kick off of, I was in deep trouble. At some point in the sink to the bottom stage of my exercise, I guess I decided to just stay down there.

I am fortunate that the swim coaches were attentive and noticed that one of their charges had not surfaced and seemed to settle on the floor of the pool. Three fully clothed swim coaches jumped into the water to rescue me, bring me to the surface, and haul me out of the water onto the concrete. I spit and gagged and gasped and coughed, but I was breathing and I did not require any mouth to mouth resuscitation. They were very solicitous and concerned and had the team physician check me out and then a call was made to my mother to come and pick me up.

As they passed me back into my mother’s care, one of the coaches told her that there was no need for me to return for another session and that due to my incredible lack of stamina I was not swim team material. My single record setting lap at the try-outs was a flash in the pan that would not lead to any further accolades.

So, finally, my swim career died a natural death without succeeding in polishing me off as well. When people are reminiscing and the topic of former athletic grandeur comes up, I can say with total accuracy that as a child I set a speed record as a sprint swimmer in my age bracket. If pressed for elaboration, I just sigh and look modestly away and say “Oh, I won’t bore you with the details.”