A Blaze of Glory: Reward For Hard Work

I had been swimming for over an hour when the world went up in flames.  Or so it seemed.

Unfortunately, a lot about life is actually pretty predictable and even boring.  Life is pleasant here, and I am happy.  But, I don't want to be complacent and ordinary.

That may be one reason I get up early in the morning and shake my own tree, so to speak.  The idea is that you have to find some way to push your own boundaries or challenge yourself or you end up going through life half asleep and dulled, a plodder.  No thank you.

This morning the house seemed cooler than usual.  I went through my routine of preparing to go and then drove across town to the pool.  It feels colder there.  And very dark.  Campus lights don't come on until 6 AM.  The only ones on are at the pool.  As you approach, you see steam from the boiler room  backlit by the floodlights and when the pool covers come off, the pool glows a pale blue.  The pool is a creature unto its own, it seems.  It's old, worn, used hard and very little improvements made to it over its 50 years of existence.  This early morning swimming thing is not for neophytes.  You jump in because you know the pool and how it feels, not because its especially attractive or appealing.  You have a relationship with it, know its quirks, and you begin a sort of conversation with it in a way that's especially noticeable when your vision is limited by the darkness.

This was the last workout of the week, but that does not mean the work was any lighter.  It was, as it has been, meant to build strength.  Hello, tubes and paddles.  Tubes are small inner tubes you inflate and put around your ankles to emphasize stroke faults so you correct them.  That's the hope you have, that the suddenly magnified swaying of your hips from side to side will be much more detectable and you can then correct that.  Easier said than done.  You swim more slowly with tubes on your ankles, and you feel much more of a flopper than ever before.  Today, I flopped a lot.  My pride went and sulked in the locker room while I plodded on, back and forth in my lane.

I was game to do the work and make myself a faster, smoother swimmer, but the truth is I never felt that way today.  I felt tired, slow, hopelessly uncoordinated.  I wondered when the strength would ever show up.  The tubes dig into my skin if I don't have them on just right, and the younger swimmers on the other side of the pool looked ridiculously fast and unconcerned with the myriad challenges presented by using an inner tube on one's ankles at 6 AM in the dark on a cold morning.  What the heck?  I wondered. Why was I going through all this discomfort anyway?  Some questions are better not asked.  Not at 6 AM anyway, in the cool pale steam of a winter morning.

I stuck with the work as best I could, imagining myself finally getting more fit and more capable of doing the whole workout.  It was a mental morning.  The bear was jumping up and down on my back and considering a piano when, eventually, Mark, the coach, took a little pity on me and had me do some breaststroke work.

That felt better.  I had more focus, more interest in the drills and understood the reasons for them.  I thought maybe there was actually some hope for myself in the long run.  Maybe there is a God.

Then I noticed a beautiful thing.  Far over in the east a big heavy cloud formation was lurking ominously.  It glowered and threatened a change in the weather.  I had begun to notice it at about 6:30 and during a break between swim sets.  I looked up without my goggles on and there it was - the blaze of glory - the clouds had turned blood red and were streaked with orange.  A fabulous sunrise was spreading itself from north to south, from the far horizon to overhead and reflecting off the surface of the pool.  It looked like a furnace turned sideways and magnified by a million.  The colors kept changing from crimson to scarlet to vivid shades of orange and then gold-edged fantasy.  A technicolor show on the highest order, and I had paid the admission price.

If I hadn't been up to swim in the cold and dark, I'd have totally missed the entire extravaganza.  I paid with some humbled pride and tired arms and shoulders, but what a way to end the workout, eh?  I'd do it again in a second.

A New Dawn: 5:30 Swim Today

In a vein of self-discovery - or rediscovery, which would be more accurate - I got up at 5 and drove over to the college for the 5:30 AM workout.  I hadn't made the effort to get going before dawn in about six or seven years, maybe more.  It felt strangely exciting to do again.  I guess that's a good sign.

The sky is black at 5:15 and it was very cold for our neck of the woods.  36 degrees.  The edges of frost were beginning to cut at living things, put some real teeth into the night.

A pool at 5:30 with the air at 36 degrees looks haunted.  Steam whisps and whorls were rising from the boiler room, the deck and the pool itself.  Two tall light standards flood the area with just enough light, dark enough to focus attention on the pool and swimming.  The locker room is not heated.  That's where it gets a teeny bit challenging.

The water is 79 or 80 degrees, like having Hawaii in the middle of cold winter.  As soon as you jump into the water, you're good.  The coaches, left on deck bundled in parkas and layers of clothes, are the ones who suffer.  That would be Mark Temple and Mary Hazdovac, coaches of Monterey Bay Swim Club.

What I found as I swam was that I felt really good.  I was enjoying the water, the movement, the rhythm of the various strokes.  Moving up and down the lane was much different than in daytime when everything and everyone distracts me from my stroke.  In the dark of predawn, I barely saw the other swimmers in other lanes.  They seemed like phantoms.  I only saw trails of silvery bubbles whirling from the turbulence of their kicking feet or stroking arms.  A flash of an arm whose skin was lit by the beaming light, undulating bodies in the far lanes doing butterfly or turning at the wall to reverse back to the other end.  Quick looks at merpeople, swimmers moving at 6 AM in the wintertime dark.

With nearly all my visual input reduced to my own lane of water and the darkened underwater view of the bottom below me dim and uninteresting, my mind focused easily on the work at hand.  Today, the focus was on pulling drills using drag buckets that emphasize the smoothness of the entire stroke, the symmetry of the pull and recovery.  When you take the bucket off, you feel fast and powerful.  Tomorrow, I won't be feeling so fast.  I'll be feeling sore.  My muscles will adjust, but it's going to take awhile.

By the time the workout ended at 7 AM, dawn was beginning to creep over the far horizon and Venus was dimming in the southern sky, a bright beacon that winked at me.  "Good morning, old girl," I said.  "We're up early, you and I."  The morning light growing in the east was like stage lights coming up on a play.  A sense of anticipation and possibility filled me.  It was simple, beautiful, quiet and I'd missed it all those years.

The showers were hot and breakfast was very satisfying.  I'm still thinking about possible swims, places to travel and challenges for myself.  A dawn morning in winter is an inspiring thing.

Journey Begun: Visionary Hero

There is a friend of mine with a wonderful vision that is calling him forward on a journey that he finds irresistible but, at times, intensely difficult:  "It's like pushing a snowball up an active volcano."

He is Mark Temple, a Canadian swim coach of some renown in his country but little known outside of it except to swimming cognoscenti.  Having coached dozens of Canadian Olympians in his career, he has mastered his craft and loves it.  He is dynamic, knowledgable and passionate about all things aquatic.  Now he intends to bring the world of swimming as he knows it (think Michael Phelps) to this beautiful area where he now lives.

I've been writing recently about relating personal transformation and effort to The Hero's Journey, so eloquently delineated by Joseph Campbell.  Mark, energetic visionary that he is, has embarked on a new journey, and his progress is easily paralleled with the classic monomyth.  Dragons, monsters, difficult stony paths await any hero who embarks on a difficult path, no matter how great their vision or sense of purpose.  It's never easy, but then again great effort produces great results for those who undertake the journey wisely.  

There is also a tidy model that describes what Mark has done so far:  V x D x F > R  This model was taught to the attendees of the Chautauqua at Mt. Madonna last July.  V stands for vision.  The individual or entity must have a strong vision of what they would like to accomplish, or a new idea.  D stands for dissatisfaction.  There must be a strong enough dissatisfaction with things as they are to motivate the person to undergo effort to make the change occur.  F stands for first steps, which must be done to initiate change.  All of these must occur before R, resistance, can be overcome.  All of them must be greater than the resistance to the change envisioned for the action to succeed.

Often, impulsively, we take first steps but have no vision; we're just mad about something.  We don't get very far.  Or, we have a vision but falter and no steps are taken.  Resistance to change cannot be overcome and the idea fails.

Mark Temple has a very strong vision, based on experience in several very successful coaching experiences, of building an international aquatics center at Cal State University at Monterey Bay (CSUMB).  He sees the potential and relates it to teaching children water safety, hosting international training sessions for swimming, water polo, synchronized swimming, diving, masters swimming, and providing a beautiful aquatics facility to serve our community.  It fills a void and creates a wonderful potential in many ways.

Mark has worked in effective aquatics programs before, has seen incredible centers used by people of all ages, and has enjoyed what the Monterey Peninsula already offers to golfers and dazzled admirers of nature.

First steps have been taken.  Monterey Peninsula Swim Association Foundation has been formed.  People are becoming curious, interested, involved.  They are being asked to take the journey with him; he is putting out the call.

The journey for Mark Temple has begun.  He has to get the snowball up the volcano, but his vision will hold him in good stead.  Vision and energy are things he has in abundance, but he will still encounter obstacles, frustration and pitfalls.  It's the nature of taking a journey.  He believes in the worth of the effort.  He intends to bring home a treasure, and when he does he return, he will be changed, for the journey always changes the hero.