Swimming Studies Read online

  ALSO BY LEANNE SHAPTON

  The Native Trees of Canada

  Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry

  Was She Pretty?

  BLUE RIDER PRESS A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Leanne Shapton

  Photographs in “Size” copyright © 2012 by Michael Schmelling

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  “Swimming Studies” originally appeared on nytimes.com, as did portions of “Derek” and “Night Kitchen,” the latter two in pieces originally titled “In the Night Kitchen” and “Raiders of the Night Kitchen.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shapton, Leanne.

  Swimming studies / Leanne Shapton.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-399-15817-9

  1. Shapton, Leanne. 2. Women swimmers—Canada—Biography. I. Title.

  GV838.S47A3 2012 2012011506

  797.21092—dc23

  [B]

  Some personal names and identifying details have been changed.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  To Mom, Dad, and Derek

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Leanne Shapton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  WATER

  QUITTING

  BYRON

  SWIMMING STUDIES

  FINALS

  DOUGHNUTS

  SWEATSHIRTS

  LAUNDRY

  FOURTEEN ODORS

  CROWN ASSETS

  OTHER SWIMMERS

  STUDEBAKERS

  ETOBICOKE

  DEREK

  NIGHT KITCHEN

  TRAINING CAMP

  SIZE

  ST. BARTS

  PISCINE OLYMPIQUE

  COACHES

  PRACTICE

  MOM

  TITANIC

  GOGGLES

  PIÑA COLADA

  JAWS

  VALS

  BATHING

  SWIMMING POOLS

  SECOND SWIM

  Acknowledgments

  WATER

  Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without. Trying to define what swimming means to me is like looking at a shell sitting in a few feet of clear, still water. There it is, in sharp focus, but once I reach for it, breaking the surface, the ripples refract the shell. It becomes five shells, twenty-five shells, some smaller, some larger, and I blindly feel for what I saw perfectly before trying to grasp it.

  QUITTING

  Say I’m swimming with people, in the ocean, a pool, or a lake, and one of them knows about my history as a swimmer, and remarks to the others, “Leanne’s an Olympic swimmer.” I’ll protest: “No, no, I only went as far as the Olympic trials—I didn’t go to the Olympics.” But the boast bobs up like a balloon, bright and curious to some, wistful and exposed to me.

  When pressed, it is usually enough to say I went to the 1988 and 1992 Canadian Olympic trials. That nationally, I was ranked eighth once, briefly. I explain that to go to the Olympics you have to finish first or second at the trials. This is where the conversations end. After paddling around we wade into the shallows or hoist ourselves up onto the boat or the dock, and the conversation turns toward food, or gossip.

  • • •

  I don’t have vivid memories of the Olympic trials, or of winning medals; I barely remember quitting the first time, in 1989, or how I told Mitch, my coach. It would have probably been at an evening practice. On the deck, after, when the other swimmers had gone to change. I would have been standing there in my suit with my duffel bag and towel. He would have said something like “What’s up?” And then I would have said it. Said my family was moving to the countryside, said I did not want to live with another family in order to train—so, I said, I had decided to quit.

  I might have done it while icing my knees. Freestylers, backstrokers, and butterflyers usually have shoulder problems, but most breaststrokers have knee problems, advised to ice regularly and take eight aspirin a day. After workouts and races, I would sit in the bleachers with a styrofoam cup of frozen water, rolling the flat ice against the insides of my knees until they turned bright pink and lost all feeling. I’d peel the cup back from the edges so it wouldn’t squeak against the numb skin. The ice would become slick, contouring as it melted.

  But I don’t remember talking to him. I do remember talking to Dawn, the assistant coach, the next morning. Mitch wasn’t on deck. We sat in two plastic folding chairs by the side of the pool, watching the team practice. Dawn told me Mitch was angry. She asked me what I was going to do. I think I said take up piano and study art, knowing she wouldn’t get it. Knowing maybe even I didn’t get it. I remember looking out at the swimmers in the lanes, heading into the hard main set, and thinking: I’ve crossed the line. I don’t have to do that anymore. I remember sitting there and feeling relieved.

  Mitch once told me: “You’re going to be great.” Then Dawn told me: “Mitch doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  When you’re a swimmer, coaches stand above you, over you. You look up to them, are vulnerable, naked and wet in front of them. Coaches see you weak, they weaken you, they have your trust, you do what they say. The relationship is guardian, father, mother, boss, mentor, jailer, doctor, shrink, and teacher. My heart broke.

  • • •

  My grandfather was a bomber pilot in the Second World War. Though he lived into his late eighties, he’s frozen in my mind as the young man in a photo, wearing a flight suit and goggles, grinning next to a B-25 Mitchell. The image that comes to mind when I think of my mother is a snapshot of her, taken around 1983, sitting on her bed dressed in work clothes: silk shirt, trousers, long necklace, smiling. If I think of my dad, he’s in our dining room, clapping and singing along to “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers. The default image I have of myself is a photo: me, ten, standing next to the ladder at Cawthra Park pool in a blue bathing suit, knees clenched, trying to catch my breath.

  I’ve defined myself, privately and abstractly,
by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practiced five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn’t the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn’t the best; I was pretty good.

  • • •

  I liked how hard swimming at that level was—that I could do something difficult and unusual. Liked knowing my discipline would be recognized, respected, that I might not be able to say the right things or fit in, but I could do something well. I wanted to believe that I was talented; being fast was proof. Though I loved racing, the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.

  I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors. I’m drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky. When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races.

  BYRON

  I e-mail one of my old coaches, Byron MacDonald, and ask to sit in on a morning practice at the University of Toronto pool. When I arrive, Byron and his assistant coach, Linda, are standing at the deep end, each holding a photocopy of the workout. They look exactly as I remember them. Byron still has a contained Roy Scheider swagger. Linda’s no-bullshit poker face is still quick to laugh.

  The pool looks the same too. It has an odd palette for a swimming pool: orange, brown, and beige, with bursts of varsity blue on the pennants, the deck, and the seven letters of TORONTO spaced evenly between each of the eight lanes. When I swam with Byron, I’d wonder what practice was like from on deck, what it felt to be warm and dry up there, in sneakers and shorts. I’d always been curious about the tedium a coach might experience, while the rest of us, in the water, pushed against the thousands of meters of warm-up, main sets, and warm-down. Time passes with precision in a workout, every minute—every second—is felt and accounted for. In other words, time passes slowly.

  I’m surprised, then, watching practice from the deck, to find it pass quickly.

  I don’t glance at the clock for the first forty minutes. Watching Byron’s swimmers combing through the water keeps me in a hypnotic focus. Byron stands beside me and describes the trajectory of a few swimmers’ careers: one is the team’s best hope for placement on the Canadian Olympic team; another is struggling with an eating disorder; one boy, watching the workout, is sidelined by a broken foot. Between sets Byron announces my presence on the deck, explaining that “Leanne swam with us a couple of years ago.” I do a quick calculation in my head. It’s been exactly twenty years, to the month.

  • • •

  Byron has replaced the analog pace clocks, with their four, multicolored sweeping hands, with small, digital ones that perch in the corners of the pool. Temporal surveillance cameras. He still says things like “Let’s go on the top” or “Everyone in the water on the top,” referring to the red hand of the clock reaching the number 60 at the top of the face. His expressions jolt me back into the firm macro-grip on time I had as swimmer. The ability to make still lifes out of tenths of seconds.

  As we watch the team, Byron directs my attention to one swimmer, a boy whose turns are remarkable. Linda corrects a girl’s backstroke, explaining that she needs to lead with her shoulder not her hand, and I remember being the recipient of that kind of attention, knowing there was perfection to trace and retrace, unwavering details of technical precision that, on good days, made practice a sharpening, rather than the unraveling it usually felt like to me. I loved drills best, when I could feel the water in centimeters and so understand how tiny adjustments and angles added up and propelled my body more efficiently. We’d move slowly up and down the pool, sculling with only our hands and wrists, or swim backstroke pointing to the ceiling with one hand and pausing for the other hand to catch up. I liked the idea of bodies as hydrodynamic, the eddies and ripples, the repetition, the needlepoints of swimming.

  Byron takes me through the changes the sport has undergone in the past twenty years. He illustrates each detail—technical suits, track blocks, false-start rules—with trivia-studded anecdotes. He furnishes last names and years, recounts heartbreaking stories of disqualifications and losses, adds gossip, footnotes inventions and media coverage with a born storyteller’s delivery. I ask him if anyone’s ever made a pun on his name and that of Lord Byron, the water-loving poet and swimmer of the Hellespont. He laughs and says no, that maybe the only appropriate time to have done it was when he competed for Canada at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

  SWIMMING STUDIES

  FINALS

  On a wet November afternoon, I drive my rented Ford Focus to the Etobicoke Olympium to watch the finals of a national swim meet.

  • • •

  The easiest way to describe the insular, clammy, circumscribed, and largely underexposed world of competitive swimming is to explain what finals are like.

  I sit with Linda and Byron, high in the wooden bleachers. The waffled rows of seating look as they did twenty years ago: a mess, like the open drawers of a giant chest, sloppy with duffel bags, candy-colored towels, damp swimmers, perspiring coaches, heat sheets, papers, and clothes. And food. Two swimmers eat raw vegetables from a cardboard box of produce. A coach peels an orange. A girl crams gorp into her mouth while a boy unwraps a foil package, cuts a section of chocolate-chip banana bread with a plastic knife, and chews it thoughtfully. The benches are strewn with granola bar wrappers and empty water bottles. Another boy drinks a fresh muddy-brown protein shake, the mini-blender blades dripping onto his feet. Bright blue and green sports drinks are stuffed into sneakers atop algebra textbooks, iPads and iPods, and T-shirts. Talking T-shirts. They have the testosterone tone of action-movie trailers, amped up and motivational. Directly in front of me, the backs of three swimmers advise me to SEE THE INVISIBLE / FEEL THE INTANGIBLE / ACHIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE; RISE TO THE CHALLENGE; IN ORDER TO IMPROVE, ATTEMPT THE IMPOSSIBLE. Farther down the bleachers, a fourth reassures me that A CHAMPION NEVER STANDS ON THE PODIUM ALONE.

  • • •

  It is a long-course (LC) meet, which means the races are swum in fifty meters rather than twenty-five, the length of most Canadian community pools. Competitions held in twenty-five-meter or twenty-five-yard pools are referred to as short-course (SC).

  The swimming calendar has two seasons. The SC, from September to March, and the LC, from April to August. Both seasons culminate in national-level meets like this one, open to all ages, with morning preliminary heats and evening finals. Minimum qualifying times are posted by Swimming Canada, the national governing body of competitive swimming. These are usually the thirty-sixth-place time in each event from the previous year’s national championship.

  Because of these time standards—provincial, national, and international—swimmers’ goals are temporal and their efforts interior rather than adversarial or gladiatorial. The sport is judged by the indifferent clock.

  When I swam, I always saw familiar faces in my heats, but I knew them by their times—in descending tenths and hundredths of seconds—as much as by their names.

  • • •

  This is what a pool, outfitted for a big meet, looks like:

  At either end of each of the eight lanes of a long-course pool is a starting block. (Some Olympic-standard pools have ten lanes, but the races use only the middle eight of those ten.) All races over fifty meters start from the same end. The blocks are fitted with an angled back panel where a swimmer can rest one foot higher than the other, for extra traction during the start.

  Each block holds an individual speaker that transmits the sound of the starting horn evenly. The blocks are also fitted with a light that flashes when the horn sounds, for the hearing-impaired. (Since light moves faster than sound, some swimmers choose to react to the light.)

  Wired to the block are two timin
g plungers, coiled cords synched with the starting horn, used as backup if the swimmer has a soft finish (not exerting enough pressure at the wall to register a time) or if the touchpads fail. These are started electronically and stopped manually by two of three officials who are stationed behind each block. The third official times the race manually with a stopwatch.

  The officials, required to dress in head-to-toe white, are volunteers. They are parents of swimmers, parents of former swimmers, or former swimmers themselves. During races, the area around and behind each block is understood to be a place of private focus—an invisible box thick with tension. Even though the timers and officials share it, the swimmers ignore them or treat them with minimal politesse.

  In the pool, affixed to the wall at the ends of each lane are wide yellow panels, bisected vertically by a black stripe. These are pressure-sensitive touchpads, used to make the most accurate record of a swimmer’s finish. The lanes are demarcated by lane ropes: buoyant plastic discs, strung together along a taut wire. The three middle lane ropes, marking lanes four and five, are strung with yellow discs. This is to indicate where the two fastest qualifiers swim—a practice developed to help television audiences recognize those lanes. Lane ropes are always a solid color five meters from either end, and at fifteen meters from each wall are marked in red. Swimmers must surface after turns and starts before or at the mark, or they will be disqualified. A thin rope is strung across the width of the pool to further judge this rule. Also strung across the pool, five meters from each end, are backstroke flags. These festive plastic triangles (which remind me of used-car lots) are used by backstrokers to gauge turns and finishes. Near the competition pool, there is usually a warm-down pool, often the diving tank, where swimmers do relaxed laps after races in order to keep lactic acid from building up.

  • • •