Chlorine and the Brain

Swim coaches have to be peculiar people, and if they weren’t before they chose a job that requires endless 4am starts and dealing with high-school kids and breathing in chlorine and being indoors all the time, I suspect the environment would make them peculiar after a while anyway. Whatever, as my daughters would say. Swim coaches are peculiar, and a bit vindictive too. I see shadows of this malevolence too often in the training sessions laid out so cheerily by the various coaches I deal with. Take yesterday. After a decent warm-up, we went into 400 yards of kicking. This hurts my legs, which are always tired from riding and running. I hate kicking. That’s one reason I wear a wetsuit, so my legs can trail behind me, floating effortlessly, preserving their energy for the remaining 130+ miles of slog ahead, instead of burning off by making bubbles and froth behind me, with no apparent gain in propulsion. Maybe that’s why I am so lousy at kicking, or maybe I don’t like kicking because I am lousy at it. Again, whatever. I have made my peace with myself. Never will I go one-on-one with Flipper in an aquatic kicking contest and teach him a lesson (Flipper was a boy, right? I never thought of that until now). A new coach once thoughtfully offered a few comments on my stroke, kindly avoiding use of words like “clunky” and “splashing”. He said “you don’t kick much” and I could only agree, and continue not to kick much, seeing the hope and optimism slowly vanish over the coming weeks as he realized he was engaged in a pointless battle of wills with someone on whom he had absolutely no leverage.

After the 400 kick, which I did, saying things to myself about the coach and his parents that were, at best, unkind and at worst actionable, he chimed in with a set of 200s, which were to be done with a variable breathing pattern of 3, 5, 3 and 7 strokes, switching each 50. Now much as I dislike kicking, I have grown quite used to oxygen over the years. I find it improves my athletic performance when I can breathe. I suspect this is why god gave me a mouth and nose and lungs, so I would be able to take in oxygen and function as a human being. The only benefit I have ever seen from these absurd “breath control” exercises in the pool is that I get a nasty headache for several hours afterwards, and I swim like a box jellyfish while my eyes go red and I think unkind things about the coach. So, as with the useful advice on kicking, I adjusted the set to be 3 and 5 strokes, with an occasional 2 strokes tossed in when I felt the blood pressure rising in my ears. “How did it go?” he asked in his bright voice. “Good,” I replied, adding “but I didn’t do it the way you wrote it because I kind of like oxygen.” Shattered, he mumbled something about how we should all do whatever we can, or something of equal emptiness, and walked off to bestow wisdom on some other oxygen-deprived sap.

Then, it was stroke time. I love this part of the workout. Years ago, I actually did all the strokes, bouncing wildly from lane-rope to lane-rope as I backstroked my way up and down the pool to the eternal bemusement of those people who had actually learned this stroke and saw how ugly it could be in the hands of a real amateur. I would breast-stroke like an enthusiastic frog and in my butterfly I always tried to make up with strength what I lacked in fluidity, which is a serious mistake in the water. But those days are passed. Now I just do freestyle, and when the coach writes up complex workouts that involve different strokes, I ignore it completely and just do freestyle. Occasionally, a new coach will suggest that I “try it” and I respond with something like “nah, not any more” and off I go, unbalanced, legs barely kicking, breathing every two strokes. I can almost hear the sobs.

The other day, there were just two of us at a 5am masters workout, and just two lanes (not that we could have used more, obviously; even someone who had just completed Intro to Math could tell you that). The coach, who was preoccupied with six lanes of high school swimmers who kick and breathe every 25 strokes and do IM like it’s nothing, suggested that we do a long warm up, and he’d come back with a workout then. I suggested that if we did a long enough warm-up, we could go straight into a warm-down, and then hit the showers. His face tightened a little into one of those smiles you used to see on the front of a 1950s Buick, and he said yeah and sidled off to be with the kids. Not much point in arguing with someone old enough to be your father who is standing there in speedos and goggles at 5am. He knew he had no chance.