Nose Dive

I started swimming regularly when I was pregnant with my son. Slowly at first, a tentative breaststroke, with my head held high above the water. I watched the clock and climbed out after twenty minutes. Within weeks after my son was born, the lap swim lanes at our nearby pool closed and the only way I could continue swimming was to join the masters’ team that practiced there. I balked at the idea. I had seen those masters in the locker room, many of them former college swimmers, loud, muscular, and fiercely competitive. I had never been on any team. Title Nine did not exist when I was growing up in Iran, and at thirty nine, I thought I was too old to learn how to swim.

My husband, an excellent swimmer, convinced me that I had nothing to lose. Easy for him to say, he didn’t have to show off his doggy paddle to our “team”. And so began our new routine, bundling our infant boy in his car seat and driving to the pool to join the morning workout. And while he snoozed on the deck, I learned to stroke and breathe, to keep my chin tucked, to reach and pull the water, and flutter kick “like your feet are in a shoebox” – this from a fellow swimmer’s husband who stood on the deck with a thermos of coffee and never hesitated to correct my form and technique. I owe my stroke to Dick’s belligerent, incredibly effective hollering. But progress was slow. Standing in the shallow waters of lane six, I gazed longingly at the swimmers in the faster lanes, their arms like eggbeaters churning the water. From where I stood, they were swimming in the ocean and I was a turtle in the baby pool just trying to get to the other side.

Months went by before I stopped long enough at the wall to realize I wasn’t alone, that I shared a lane with some wonderful people. Unlike lap swimming where you grudgingly acknowledge the half-naked person next to you, the camaraderie in my lane was reason enough to show up at 5:45 am. Barely recognizable to each other in our street clothes, we were best friends in the pool – asking after our kids, jobs, or aging parents between sets, and urging each other forward during the swim. If you were gone too long, everyone asked where you’d been. We commiserated over sore shoulders and aching backs. And in the showers, a wet and noisy crowd exchanged recipes, news of our kids’ birthday parties, soccer games, and college applications – all of us yelling at once over the din of hair dryers. I felt lucky to be a part of it.

Every week that went by was marked with small improvements. A hundred yards didn’t take an eternity and boy was I flying when I put on fins or paddles! Our coach, the extraordinary Tim Sheeper, gave quiet, thoughtful tips, and I pushed off the wall, more mindful of my stroke. It wasn’t long before I realized what the others had always known, that he has never once repeated a workout. As a chef, I may never make the same dish the same way twice, but it isn’t brand new and unrecognizable each time. Tim’s uncanny ability to compose a completely original workout day after day, unlike any written before, is as remarkable as a composer writing a new opera every day. I’ve given up trying to figure out how he does it but when we pull up to the wall to hear the next round, my mind immediately organizes his set into an order like the one a waiter takes at your table in a restaurant. Somehow, I remember the sequence better when I picture tasks and I work up an appetite for breakfast. Soon we’ve finished the set, I’ve witnessed another pink and orange sunrise, and I feel a sense of possibility that I remember from childhood.

People often say things like. “If you had told me twenty years ago that someday I would be a vegetarian, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Similarly, if someone had told me that someday I would be on a swim team, I would have said “Yeah, right!” My son is ten years old now, marking a decade since I joined Menlo Masters. Throughout the years, my husband has been my loudest cheerleader as he’s often been when I’ve faced seemingly insurmountable tasks. He will yell “Good job!” across the five lanes that separate us and give me a thumbs-up. It’s corny, but it motivates me in an oh-gosh-thanks-didn’t-know- you-were-watching kind of way. Dick passed away leaving us rookies bereft, so any encouragement, any correction, goes a long way. My butterfly is dismal, flapping my wings and going nowhere, but the backstroke is coming along thanks to Ann, Dick’s wife. Her stern yet enormously generous coaching keeps me in line. And Coach Tim, who has brought us all together, stands on deck, day after day, before the break of dawn, in the rain, in freezing temperatures, challenging you to beat your time, swim with your shoes on, take fewer and fewer breaths, and you wouldn’t dream of wimping out, ever.

I’m still going to the pool when it’s dark and everyone in my house is asleep. I miss seeing my baby boy swaddled under the canopy of his car seat. I’ve moved up a lane or two and I watch the clock only to measure my speed. Counting clears my head of all the noise, lists, schedules, and emails waiting on my desk. My most complex thought may be whether I’ll make pancakes or oatmeal for breakfast. In that hour before the sun comes up, I am only aware of the bubbles from the swimmer ahead of me and the silhouette of the person behind me, and I know without exchanging a word, who it is, by the unique way they swing an arm, or kick mostly with their right leg, or tilt their head for a flip turn. Then I wonder if fish recognize other fish in their school from a similar data of gestures. No wonder I don’t recognize them at Trader Joe’s without their cap and goggles.