C. Cal

The Golden Age

When I was in college at Berkeley, I was on the swim team and for a time I shared a flat with three other swimmers. One of them recently mentioned on Facebook that she has just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and then went on to say that she had also just celebrated her 60th birthday by swimming 60 x 50s on the 50.  

M and me, swimming at Hearst pool, circa 1927.

In plain English, that’s sixty two-lap sets, each one completed in under 50 seconds. 120 laps total. 3,000 yards. Swum in 50 minutes.

Now, if you’re not a swimmer you might not quite understand what a remarkable statement that is but suffice to say that is blazing fast. I doubt I could do it even when I was aged 18 and swimming for Cal, then one of the top ten women swim teams in the country. Of course, my friend M was a miler, whereas I was a sprinter, but still. At 60. With cancer. Respect is DUE, as Fugazi used to say.

So I told my other swimming friends this — “Hey, did you hear that M has cancer? Oh, and that she can still do 60 fifties on the fifty?” -- and unfortunately one of them said, “Ok, so now WE have to do that.”

Me: “As IF.”

Her: “Heck, we can do that. We SHOULD do that, in solidarity with M’s battle!”

Me: “Get OUT.”

This back and forth went on for a while but eventually she wore me down and the end result is that I trudged over to the local pool to swim laps and explore this truly terrible idea.

On the first day, I was just able to limp through three 50s on the 1:15 and kind of wanted to barf when I was done. The second time I went, I did five and without feeling so barfy, and now I’m up to seven.

But of course, even getting this far along has brought it all back. Swimming all those laps, all those years ago, was all about enduring boredom. And enduring pain. Actually, it was about enduring the boredom TIMES the pain. Have you ever walked down Bancroft Avenue, past Wurster Hall, alongside Hearst gym, towards Sproul Plaza? Unbeknownst to you, there are two little secret torture pools right behind the hedge there. Sometimes when I swam for Cal, we used to have to swim laps in that pool, tied to elastic bands tied to weights, which we had to lift. Sometimes we had follow a string of pacer lights on the bottom of the pool and keep up with them.

It was horrid. And hard. And mentally, it was all so unlike diving, my ‘real’ sport, the one I do now, for fun and relaxation. Diving is a sport where it takes almost untold amounts of mental gymnastics to get yourself to throw yourself off the tower – a combination of creative-thinking, physical self-confidence (faked), a knowledge and faith in physics, plus, imagination, because all of us, however lame, in our hearts secretly believe that we look great, which is of course in my case sheer fantasy.

JK, this is more like it.

By contrast, swimming is all about watching the clock and counting. Compared to diving practice, it is like the difference between playing Sudoku and writing a novel. Both are intellectually hard but in different ways. At least I was a sprinter, god bless, so I didn’t have to rep incredibly long sets like M did. I once asked my swimming friend how she thought distancers bore all that garbage yardage, and she said, without hesitation, “They have no inner monologue.”

And that may be true. After all, I only ever got through swim practice for all those years by reciting poetry — “in a minute there is time/for decisions and revisions that a minute can reverse” —and singing songs to myself, but these days, it has come to my attention, you can wear waterproof headphones under your cap, attached to a tiny MP3 player. I even have one, and with this project in mind I finally took the trouble to load it, which was a HUGE pain in my ass.  Now that I-tunes and Apple Music don’t let you convert all your old music into MP3s, my daughter suggested I unearth my old PC, which is full of MP3 files, and do this, but I was too lazy. Rather, I decided to rip some CDs and transfer them into the thingamajig one by one.

CDs are a dime a dozen in my house, so I just grabbed the three standing closest to my computer, which were “In Spades” by the Afghan Whigs, “The Golden Age” by Cracker and their latest, “Foothills” by the Bats, put them on the device and went to the pool.

And here’s the thing. I had thought the experience of swimming in headphones might change my life, but alas, no. The waterproof headphone is set on shuffle, so there I was in the pool, listening to whichever song by each of those artists came up, whenever. And though I like them all, the changing tempos and moods of the songs didn’t quite work for a set of five fifties done as fast as I could. One fifty was distinctly hampered when the Cracker song “Big Dipper” came on, because it was so slow. Then the Whigs song “Arabian Heights” came on and it was the opposite: it tuckered me out trying to keep up.

I can’t quite figure out how to fix this problem. Am I supposed to only put swimmable songs onto my swim headphones? And which, pray tell, are those?

I guess I’ll find out – and reprogram my device – but overall, the whole rigamarole made me feel really old and set in my ways, as well as technologically challenged, like how my mom, aged 95, must feel when asked to use a smart phone or program her DVR, stuff she is absolutely incapable of doing.

Anyway, as boring as I find swimming laps to be, it turns out I sort of like to hear things while I do it – the trees, the water, the sound of my own breath. At the moment, my short-term goal is to be able to do fifteen fifties on the minute, and when I get to that point – IF I get to that point – I will get back to you all about the probability of completing this ridiculous project.  

(This really is me. Montreal, 2014.)