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Flying Friendly Skies

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

By David

Two Air New Zealand 747s are about to bring some interesting cargo to West Auckland. West Auckland Aquatics will benefit by having them here.

Jane is the first to arrive. She comes in from London in three weeks’ time. Coach Kimberly will take training while I wait anxiously at Auckland’s International Airport. The last time I saw Jane was a year ago at Miami Airport. She was on her way back to London after a Christmas visit to Florida. The last time she was in New Zealand was three years ago when she visited Auckland with the CEO of the Seattle search engine optimization company, SEOmoz. And the last time she swam in Auckland was at the 2002 New Zealand Open Championships. She comfortably won the 100 and 200 meters breaststroke championship titles. The wins earned her selection for the New Zealand team to compete in the 2002 Pan Pacific Games in Yokohama, Japan.

Readers will probably recognize Jane as the editor and occasional contributor to the Swimwatch blog. Her last post, “Kickboard Packed” told of story of the effort that had gone into securing a swimming scholarship to study in the United States. I was touched by an email Swimwatch received from a parent in the United Kingdom in response to Jane’s story. In part the email said:

“I well remember one of the most painful days of my life was when I placed my soon to be 18 year old daughter on a plane to the United States travelling a similar journey to Jane’s. I did so (as have so many parents) in the full knowledge that our lives would never be the same again, but that this was necessary for her to provide greater opportunity than she could realize in her home town. In the intervening years the pain has been numbed but still continues and is only off set by the knowledge that for her this was the right thing as there was a limited and restricted future where she was. Like Jane, she was a talented young athlete whose swimming provided a ticket to a new life.”

In 133 words this parent captured perfectly the feeling I had watching Jane catch her flight to Yokohama. As soon as the Pan Pacific swimming was done, Jane was booked on a flight from Tokyo to Seattle to begin four years of University athletics and academic study. The correspondent is right “this was necessary for her to provide greater opportunity than she could realize in her home town; for her this was the right thing as there was a limited and restricted future where she was.”

During Jane’s visit I hope we get the opportunity to spread this British correspondent’s message to the swimmers at West Auckland Aquatics. Swimming can be so much more than training and effort, championships and titles. It can be a passport to an international career; a transformed future. Were all those ten kilometer sessions, or sets of 100x100s, worth it? Were the back-breaking training camps during college–45 degrees Fahrenheit in San Diego on the second of January as you swam endless training sessions outside–worth it? As you holiday in the south of France, or look down on New York City from the Empire State building or jog over Tower Bridge, you can bet that yes, they were.

My second visit to Auckland Airport’s international arrival terminal will be in early January 2011, to collect Rhi. Her father emailed me recently and jokingly asked, “Is New Zealand ready for the arrival of Rhi?” I’m not sure about New Zealand but I can’t wait for this larger than life American to come striding through customs. Rhi is a USA national freestyle champion, a World Long Course Championship gold medalist and she won a gold medal in the 4×200 freestyle relay at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. She swam with me for twelve months or so when I was the coach at her old club in Florida. And there is a lot of swimming left in this talented athlete.

At one US National Championships I had a meeting with the US National Coach, Mark Schubert, to discuss Rhi’s swimming. He was her coach at the University of Southern California. It’s a bit off the subject, but I’d love to know why Schubert has been fired from US Swimming. If it’s a personality fallout between Schubert and US Swimming’s Executive Director, Chuck Wielgus, I know whose side I’m on. Wielgus is an idiot. Isn’t he the one who said that US swimmers never did drugs about a week before Phelps was photographed sucking on a bong? Schubert has forgotten more about swimming that Wielgus has ever known.

Schubert knew Rhi well after their time together at USC. He had also coached many of the world’s best swimmers; Evans, Krayzelburg, Babashoff, Goodell, Benko, Cohen and Sterkell. During the meeting Schubert said, “Without question, Rhi is the most talented swimmer I’ve ever coached.” After coaching her for a year I have some understanding of his opinion. She is a huge talent and can finish a race better than any swimmer in the world. On a good day her last 50 meters is a wonder to behold.

Like all America’s best swimmers Rhi has been through the American swimming mill. It’s a tough place to learn the swimming trade. High school state championships and national records, NCAA nationals, cut throat US Olympic trials, American Nationals and Grand Prix events, Rhi has done them all and has won in them all.

She is the big picture. She has been there. She has done that. She will be good for the swimmers at West Auckland Aquatics. There is more to swimming than local age group events or Swimming New Zealand’s Age Group Championships. Real people can win Olympic swimming gold medals. And there is no better example of that than the American about to arrive in Auckland. Too right we’re ready.

I’m looking forward to the next few months. Two fine athletes, two great people, are certain to make their time here a lot of fun.

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

We Need More Volunteers

Friday, July 9th, 2010

By David

“We need three more timekeepers before we can start the meet.” In the world of competitive swimming you hear that announcement all the time. Without a huge army of volunteers the sport would quickly grind to a halt. I’ve become more aware of the role volunteers play since returning to New Zealand. In my Florida team paid staff performed many of the tasks volunteers handle in New Zealand. Invoicing training fees and preparing meet entries are two time consuming examples. I hate to think what Florida’s County bureaucrats would have made of a parent preparing the monthly pool invoice or collecting training fees. The beginnings of a Bernie Madoff incident would have been suspected and a dawn raid planned to deal with the scam. Don’t laugh, they thought dawn raids were entirely rational behavior. America sends the world a message of slick efficiency but some of the worst bureaucratic jungles exist in that country and it’s getting worse.

That’s not to say US Swimming doesn’t benefit from the work of thousands of volunteers. In 2009 there were 29,557 non athlete members registered to US Swimming. Of these 2,129 were full time coaches; Florida had 140. That still leaves 28,000 other non athlete members helping run the sport in the United States. In addition there are thousands of others who work at meets but are not registered with the national association. Some of them are real hard workers. I knew a lady in Florida who was the mother of a Florida State High School 100 freestyle champion. She was an amazing worker. She updated the team’s notice board, ran the hospitality service for each swim meet, recruited the officials necessary to run local meets, organized the team Christmas party and spent hours standing on the pool deck, in the Florida sun, inspecting starts and turns. Best of all she did it in a good spirit; happy to be part of things working well. Another exceptional volunteer in America was an attorney who was on the Club’s Board. I would think he provided the team and me with about an average of two hours of his time every week for five years. The normal charge out rate for a senior attorney in the United States is $350 an hour. In five years that’s $182,000 of free advice. He insisted on paying his full swimming training fees as well. Yes, there are some very good people out there.

Good volunteers in New Zealand are no different. We have four grafters I must tell you about. First of all there is the team handicapper. “What on earth is that?” I hear every United States reader ask. Well, in New Zealand, the person who processes the team’s racing results and meet entries is called a Handicapper. I suspect the origin of the name dates back to when many swimming races in New Zealand were handicapped with some swimmers starting at go while the faster swimmers waited for a predetermined delay before they could swim. The delays were calculated by the team’s Handicapper – hence the name. Handicap races don’t exist any longer but the name lives on. Our team handicapper has been doing the job for the Club since forever and she’s very good at it. And it’s not an easy job. Somebody is always late with their entry; someone else wants to change the 400 IM to the 50 Free one day after the entry’s closing date. It’s a nightmare. Since I’ve been back in New Zealand the team has entered six meets. Two days before each meet I’ve been presented with a printout of the entries – no stress, no drama, just a real good volunteer.

The second of our team’s four grafters looks after the team’s correspondence, updates the notice board and distributes information to members via email. It is all important and all done well. The one I like best though is the Notice Board. There’s nothing worse than having an out-of-date Notice Board. No one is interested in reading the training timetable changes from 2008. Worse are those faded newspaper cuttings and team lists so old that the paper is cracked and curled. It makes the Club look bad. If the Notice Board is a shambles what else isn’t being done right. Well we don’t have that problem. From a coach’s point of view, our Notice Boards are so good I don’t bother remembering half the things I should anymore. Someone asks me something I just point to the Notice Board; it’s all there.

The last two grafters come as a pair. They do the office stuff; invoice the team’s training fees, prepare monthly and annual accounts, apply for grants, pay invoices and pay the coach’s wages: best to keep in good with them. If it’s the team’s money, they’ve got it counted. They work early every morning while the team is at practice. In spite of the hour they seem happy enough. I occasionally call in to make a cup of coffee and it’s like a good British comedy in there; stories, laughs and good hearted banter. I won’t be able to tell this story nearly as well as it was told to me but two days ago one of the grafters had a disaster at home; her washing machine broke down. The wretched thing wouldn’t drain properly. In fact it had been getting worse for a couple of months. Finally a plumber was called. He searched and searched and finally he found a pair of our grafter’s panties – in New Zealand they are called knickers – stuck in the drainage pipe. “I was so embarrassed.” she said, “I wondered where they’d gone.”

So there you have it, good volunteers not only keep the place going they provide entertainment as well.

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

How to Fail at Internet Trolling

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

By Jane

I pose a question to you, dear Internet. How stupid would you have to be to write a hand-written anonymous letter to a party to whom you’d already sent hand-written mail?

I’m going with “fairly dense”. Here are two images of a letter received today by one of our swim team’s sponsors, Oyer, Macoviak and Associates, with whom East Coast Swimming has a referral programme. The letter is a print-out of Swimwatch’s last entry. The entire entry was printed out and included in the envelope; here, I’ve replicated only the pages which were written on. Note, the “sender’s address” is that of a public swimming pool and is, of course, fake. The pool had nothing to do with the note.

We immediately had our suspicions as to who was responsible for the note, and luckily, we had an older correspondence from the person with which we could cross-check the penmanship. When placing certain letters next to each other, it became even more apparent that our guess was correct. Forgive the photographed images of the older letter: someone else scanned today’s letter, and our scanner is broken.

I’m not a handwriting analysis expert, but I’m also not legally blind.

First, let’s look at “A”.

There are three tell-tale signs here. The straight line, extending slightly above the curve of the letter to the left is one; however, far more telling are the small flick backwards at the end of the stroke downwards, and the extended cross-stroke.

Let’s now look at an instance of a double “e”.

Again, a distinctive flick to the left, along with an identical overall shape, most certainly suggest that these were written by the same person.

On to the capital “D”.

Because I don’t doubt the eyesight of any of you, it’s unlikely I need to point out the similarities between these characters. However, it’s worth mentioning the defining point about each D: the bottom-heavy nature of the characters appears somewhat like the letter was filled with something–bullshit comes to mind–which was then left to settle.

There were two varieties of “r” in both letters. The second looks quite a lot like a “v”:

It appears even more convincing that the writer is the same person when two different ways of writing the “r” are included in both letter.

Finally, the writer’s rendition of “Seacrest” is remarkably similar in both instances.

Notice the follow-through from the “e” to the “a” in both words, as well as the similar “r”s. Finally, the fact that the stroke through the final “t” extends far further to the right seems like the perfect seal on the fact that today’s weird attempt to interfere with a local swim team’s sponsor and an earlier letter, written to the same team, were penned by the same person. Only the “t” was not the last shred of evidence: both letters were postmarked West Palm Beach, which is not the town in which the team is based.

I wonder if you also licked the envelope when you sealed it, and the stamp when you attached it? Anonymous trolling: you’re doing it wrong.

It’s obviously tempting to “out” the writer. If we were to print the full image of the older letter, the person’s identity would certainly be clear. But is it really worth it? The second rule of the Internet is not to feed the trolls, after all, and I think this applies, even though the correspondence was largely offline. Since it’s apparent that the person responsible reads this website with some regularity, I’m sure she’ll see this. And she’ll know that she failed.

Posted in Florida | 2 Comments »

I Quit: An Updated Guide To Swimming Retirement

Monday, January 12th, 2009

By Jane

I pride myself on quitting both when I’m ahead and at the right time, and I quit swimming on March 18, 2006. I’ve written one post already about how I stayed fit post-swimming (and I’m down to size 1 and 2 jeans now, thanks for asking), but two years after I began running and almost three years after I last set foot on a starting block, I have a new outlook on maintaining a functional life, post-elite athletics.

Hello, random reader. You think this is overly dramatic and out of touch. “Maintaining a functional life, post-elite athletics?” How hard is it? You quit and you move on. Show up at the YMCA every Sunday and knock out a few 100s and pretend you’re still being given new Fastskins. (LZRs. Sorry. I am showing my age.) Hello, former competitive swimmer. You guys know what I mean.


The last day of my swimming career in Athens, Georgia

Random readers: don’t judge us for this. This sport consumed many of us for over a decade. We’d work studiously at it for three hours every morning and two hours every night. Once we left it, we had things to overcome. Swimming gave me some of the best moments of my life (but my no means all of them). The elation of my two best swims ever (December 2, 2001 and November 20, 2005) are only diminished by the fact that only one of them was caught on film. I didn’t have to look up those dates, either. Very little compares to swimming as fast as you can and feeling like you can swim ever faster.

Getting used to a life without that is tricky, and I was lucky in that I found something else I loved to do. However, I still have to remind myself of some things relatively often. I suggest you do the same:

  1. My former competitors no longer matter. To me.

    People I used to compete against have swum faster than I ever did in the two and a half years I’ve not been swimming. The longer I spend away from the sport, the more I understand that this doesn’t matter to me. Not only that, but the faster they swim, the more I recognise that their success means nothing to what I achieved. I can now be pleased for them. They went through as much pain and misery and hope and shit as I did.

  2. I’ll never shake my swimmer’s roots.

    Most people who run like to mix up their circuits. They like to take alternative roads. Running the same routes every day bores them. Whilst I can’t speak for all swimmers, this isn’t true for me. I run the same route every day. I know exactly where I am and, better still, I know how good or bad I’m feeling by how I feel at any given part of my run. I enjoy the consistency I learned by staring at the bottom of a swimming pool.

    Swimming teaches you an appreciation for the routines that other people call boredom. I think of them as the time I get to spend with myself, where I know exactly what should happen and where there are no surprises. This, undoubtedly, contributes to my unparalleled road rage when a cyclist runs a red light at one of my intersections. If you’re a cyclist, RED LIGHTS APPLY TO YOU, TOO. I enjoy pointing this out to you when you forget it.

  3. There is no point in resenting That Coach who committed That Crime.

    This said, I’m going to tell a story about a coach’s crime that pissed me off. It still does. I’m aware that there is no point in resenting it, and I’m trying not to. I’m not doing well.

    I swam badly at training camp, and at subsequent competitions, in the winter of 2005. Of course, by “badly”, I mean that I swam 14 seconds slower than my best time in the 200 breaststroke, and ended up in tears at the end of the UC Irvine Invitational. We’d driven from training camp in San Diego that morning. It was Fuck I’m Cold degrees Fahrenheit and I’ll never listen to Jesus of Suburbia without being in that van, content in the fact that at least we would be leaving Southern California that afternoon. My whole body had seized up and I could barely walk, let alone swim. I’d never been thinner, angrier, colder or more tired. My overriding memory of the week before my twenty-first birthday was of being freezing cold. The only thing I could do reasonably well was long aerobic work, such as 6 x 800m sets. I ate those up. Anything shorter and faster was beyond me.

    This does not look like Hell. It was.

    Later that year, I took a (previously approved) week away from my college town in between finishing my final exams and beginning a session of summer school. Upon returning, my coach was not pleased with me. The main problem, apparently, was that during the eight days I’d not been in town, the coaching staff had “had no idea where I was, nor if I was training.” Seriously: where the hell did they think I was? There were three options: at my boyfriend’s house (an hour away), in the Virgin Islands with my parents or in New Zealand. No bloody prizes for guessing that one correctly.

    Not only that, but when we began discussing specifics of my week’s absense, my poor performance at training camp that January was put down to my “not training over the Christmas break.” When I had. A lot. A lot. This hurt me badly. During my time as a swimmer, I’d be similarly accused of faking injuries to avoid certain parts of workouts. It killed me. All you can do when faced with accusations like that is violently object, which only makes you sound guiltier. It simply wasn’t true.

    But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Some coach’s idea as to how hard of a worker I was doesn’t reflect on how honest or hard working I actually was. I am still figuring this out for myself, but it’s really important to let go of those perceived coaching injustices. When I finally do (I did work out! I did I did I did I did!) I’ll be proud of myself.

  4. No, really. We do have to work out.

    As previously mentioned, I took up running to keep fit. You must exercise after you stop swimming. Every swimmer I’ve ever known who has thought they’ll effortlessly keep their physique post-athletics has put on a lot of weight. Not only that, but they get thick. They don’t lose their muscle mass, but fat piles up on top of it. It’s probably a worse look that regular fat. The worst examples turn into human brick walls. Avoiding this is pretty easy, pending genetics: stop eating as much and start doing something that burns calories on a regular basis. That LZR-ready body won’t last long if you don’t.

  5. We should ignore the self-appointed experts.

    For the rest of my life, I’ll come across people who think they know more about sport than I do. This is primarily because I don’t exude sportiness. I find breakfast cereal to be a luxury worth giving up, but pricey vodka and Bumble and Bumble shampoo unavoidable necessities. Nope, that isn’t an affiliate link: I just like their stuff a lot. But if you’re interested, Bumble, I’m here.

    However, this makes people think that I don’t know anything about sport. Someone who hasn’t worn a flat-heeled shoe while they’re not running since 2005 doesn’t get much respect from the Lyrca-clad, triathlon brigade. They’ll tell me about their training. They’ll tell me about their doctors and their injuries. They’ll tell other people about their races and I’ll overhear them. They’re forever running to an appointment of some sort so that they can be better athletes. They know a lot about diets.

    Hi! When your gym and trainer are in a building that looks like this, you’re not an athlete, you’re just a douchebag!

    The night before I broke my New Zealand record, I ate my Mum’s pasta bake (asparagus and bacon… Jesus, it’s heaven. And I don’t even like bacon) and a gi-fucking-normous bowl of strawberry icecream and chocolate sauce. I may have also gotten drunk. It’s highly likely. However, I swam faster than any Kiwi female ever had for 200m breaststroke and that record stood for three years. Kelly Bentley, you broke my heart when you swam 2:29 but I’ve got a lot of respect for ya ;)

    You don’t need to be a qualified dietician or employ a personal trainer at a Seattle health club to be a good athlete, but you don’t have to listen to the people who do believe that this is necessary. Smile nicely. Go for a run while they visit their orthopedic surgeon. Buy them a chai tea.

  6. The things we liked while we competed will change.

    I always liked morning training while I swam, but I hated getting up in the morning. Make sense? No? I always swam well in the mornings, but the act of getting out of bed at 5am was torturous. Now, I like getting up that early and I imagine the primary reason is that I don’t have to. I like a lot of things now that I didn’t like when I was an athlete, and dislike a few things I used to enjoy as well. When I no longer had those immense stresses in my life, my perspective and demeanour changed. Retired swimmers should be aware that they’ll change mentally as well as physically.

I don’t write very often for Swimwatch, the main reason being that I don’t compete or train anymore. However, I believe that dealing with being “retired” (is it obvious that I hate that word? I find it pompous) is nearly as important as coping with being an active participant.

My ninety-percent-positive experience with sport was only heightened by my philosophy on quitting: don’t get fat, resent nothing (working on that) and get out while you’re still winning.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The Worst Pools In The World

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

“If Concrete Could Burn.”

By Jane

Not long ago, we published our list of what we view as the best pools in the world. It’s a biased list in that the pools were chosen for various reasons, including their strangeness (Leeds), location (North Sydney), history (Newmarket; Rome) and sentimentality (Long Beach). But for every stunning aquatic centre, there is its ugly, over-chlorinated twin. Thus, we bring you the worst pools in the world… it turns out that they’re mostly in New Zealand, but we’ve simply not visited any real shockers elsewhere.

Clive Memorial Pool
15 Farndon Rd, Pakowhai, 4102, New Zealand

If concrete could burn, it would smell like the Clive Pool. Imagine it for a second. Old, dirty concrete, soaked in chlorine, on fire.

Windowless. Airless. They’ve added some windows since I last visited, but I doubt they’ve added oxygen. The starting blocks were rough slabs of concrete. The picnic benches to the east side of the pool were buckling under decades of dampness. The water was murky like a sick Seattle morning when the Space Needle is invisible in the fog. Underwater, I had the feeling I was swimming in blue milk.

Blue, concrete-infused milk that, at some point, had been on fire.

The weird thing about my relationship with the Clive pool was that I completed some amazing workouts there. I swam repeats of 3,000 metres faster than I ever had before in 81 degree Fahrenheit water. I first broke a minute for 100m freestyle there. When my best time for 100m breaststroke was something around 1:15, I completed a time trial in 1:12.

At least part of my successes between 1999 and 2002 were due to training sessions swum at Clive and I’ll never forget some of the good times David and I had driving from Napier, listening to our Nissan’s bitchin’ stereo, on our way to Clive for some swimming. That I had some good times there, however, does not negate the fact that Clive is definitely one of the worst pools in the world.


Lloyd Elsmore Leisure Centre

Admission is free. That should have been our first warning. More than once, we made the mistake of stopping at Lloyd Elsmore to train after the Auckland Championships. Why did we not drive to Papakura or Newmarket? I suppose convenience was our only excuse.

The pool is hot. Really hot. There are fast, medium and slow lanes, but the lane speeds aren’t enforced and the lanes are possibly half the size of a standard Olympic width. Frog-leg, 1950s breaststroke is the order of the day, whilst children pour over the lane ropes from the play area. A chronic language barrier means that no one in the pool can understand each other which, with the overcrowding, makes swimming there somewhat like navigating a Christmas sale in a foreign country.

Raumati Pool
Marine Parade, Paraparaumu Beach, 5032, Raumati, New Zealand

Do you like filth, weird hours and draconian life guards? If so, Raumati is the place for you. Let me refer you to the case of a swimmer at Raumati who was banned from the pool for flip turning. Tumble turning. Doing this. I quote:

“Here I am one quiet morning empty lane plodding up and down my last training session before Rotorua half ironman. just a 2km quicky. I get stopped 6 or so lengths into it and told “get out you are tumble turning”. I later find out (after xmas) that I have been banned for tumble turning. this has to qualify for pool rage only problem I can’t rage about it in the pool now. Any suggestions, help, is it legal, can pool staff enforce ban. I am not a happy swimmer having to travel some distance to another pool (strangely enough run by the same council – go figure).”

The thread I’ve link to documents the swimmer’s ban, at the hands of the Kapiti Coast District Council, which was initially for two years but which was reduced to six months and then overturned entirely. The grotesque crime – flip turning – was apparently not forbidden at the pool, but an overzealous pool attendant simply decided that the technique got on his nerves on that particular day. Other swimmers – including myself – have flip turned at Raumati. The pool even has a swim team. The sad thing is, this is just an extreme example of the normal idiot fodder from small-town pool attendants and city councils.

I seriously hope you’re not thinking about tumble-turning…


Napier (Onekawa) Aquatic Centre
Maadi Road, Onekawa, Hawkes Bay 4110, New Zealand

Firstly, I’d refer you to our ancient Napier Pools Guide, which rates the Napier Aquatic Centre, formerly known as Onekawa, as a miserable failure. Everything that Raumati does, the Napier Aquatic Centre can do worse.

A personal view of the Napier pool’s misgivings: For a long time, I had no good idea why I had such trouble breathing at night. I’d have awful coughing fits and difficulty regaining my breath, but I didn’t have asthma or any other distinct respiratory ailment. I also suffered from a curious light sunburn on my face year-round. Literally two weeks after I stopped training at the Napier Aquatic Centre, having moved across the Pacific to Pullman, Washington, both the cough and the burn were gone. It was the water at that pool.

Again: no ventilation, no windows, no pool rules and a generally aggressive, retarded staff. The water spelled bad. Not like Clive’s concrete, but like a dirty bath. Patrons used the backstroke flags as clothes lines. Junk food, dropped on the pool deck, was never cleaned up. The place was putrid.

King County Aquatic Center, aka Federal Way
650 SW Campus Drive, Federal Way, WA 98023

What? Surely the King County Aquatic Center doesn’t belong on a post about the world’s worst pools? Whilst in a very different league to the above, Federal Way makes the list out of pure boringness. Wet tea-towels are more inspiring. No one could have built a more personality-void, bland shell of a pool if there had been a bland-pool-building competition.

The pool produces great swimmers. There is, in fact, nothing inherently wrong with it, aside from its epic boringness. But its boringness is its downfall.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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