Swimming Studies Read online

  SWIMMING POOLS

  1. Robert J. H. Kiphuth Exhibition Pool, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

  2. Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood, California

  3. Baruch College Athletics and Recreation Complex, New York City

  4. Jamaica Inn, Ocho Rios, Jamaica

  5. Sheraton Centre, Toronto

  6. Etobicoke Olympium, Etobicoke, Ontario

  7. West Side YMCA, New York City

  8. Riad Mabrouka, Fès, Morocco

  9. Hotel Beverly Terrace, Los Angeles

  10. Metropolitan Recreation Center, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York

  11. UCLA Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, Los Angeles

  12. Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec

  13. Asphalt Green (Upper East Side), New York City

  14. Fitness First, Baker Street, London

  15. Highbury Pool, London

  16. Serson Pool, Mississauga, Ontario

  17. Barbados Aquatic Centre, Barbados

  18. Foster Pool, Lakewood, Ohio

  19. Holiday Inn City West, Berlin

  20. Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre, Brantford, Ontario

  21. Holiday Inn Express & Suites, Minneapolis

  22. Cawthra Pool, Mississauga, Ontario

  23. Thermae Bath Spa rooftop pool, Bath, England

  24. Pan Am Pool, Winnipeg, Manitoba

  25. Edmonton Kinsmen Sports Centre, Edmonton, Alberta

  26. Terry Fox Memorial Pool, Mississauga, Ontario

  27. Stadtbad Mitte, Berlin

  28. Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles

  29. Erin Meadows Pool, Mississauga, Ontario

  30. Backyard pool, North Salem, New York

  31. Manhattan Plaza Racquet Club, New York City

  32. Meadowvale Pool, Mississauga, Ontario

  33. Miraflores Park Hotel, Lima

  34. Innenbad, Hotel Therme Vals, Switzerland

  35. Babington House infinity pool, Somerset, England

  36. Wilton Family Y, Wilton, Connecticut

  37. Aussenbad, Hotel Therme Vals, Switzerland

  38. Centralbadet, Stockholm

  39. Eleanor Misener Aquatic Centre, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

  40. Piscine de Pontoise, Paris

  41. Le Westin Montréal, Montreal

  42. Astoria Pool, Queens, New York

  43. Backyard pool, Staatsburg, New York

  44. Huron Park Recreation Centre, Mississauga, Ontario

  45. Centennial Pool, Halifax, Nova Scotia

  46. Riad des Golfs, Agadir, Morocco

  47. Villa pool, Goat Hill, Jamaica

  48. The Berkeley, London

  49. Glenforest Pool, Mississauga, Ontario

  50. Claremont Hotel Club & Spa, Berkeley, California

  51. Çıra˘gan Palace Kempinski, Istanbul

  52. Oasis Sports Centre, London

  53. Laugardalslaug, Reykjavík

  54. Villa Buonvisi, Lucca, Italy

  55. Round Hill Hotel & Villas, Hopewell, Jamaica

  56. Piscine du Parc Olympique, Montreal

  57. Backyard pool, Ajax, Ontario

  58. Venetian, Las Vegas

  59. Jeno Tihanyi Olympic Gold Pool, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario

  60. Nay Aug Park, Scranton, Pennsylvania

  61. Four Seasons, Toronto

  62. Memorial Pool, McGill University, Montreal

  63. Sunnyside–Gus Ryder Pool, Toronto

  64. Nepean Sportsplex, Ottawa

  65. Château Laurier, Ottawa

  66. University of Toronto Athletic Centre, Toronto

  67. King Pool, Berkeley, California

  68. Clarkson Pool, Mississauga, Ontario

  69. Backyard pool, Gaucin, Spain

  70. McBurney YMCA, New York City

  71. Stadtbad Charlottenburg–Alte Halle, Berlin

  SECOND SWIM

  On a cold November morning, I drive my rented Ford Focus to the Etobicoke Olympium to watch the preliminary heats of a national meet.

  • • •

  I sit with Linda and Byron. After their heats the swimmers clamber into the stands, arms full of clothes and towels, cap and goggles tucked into their suits, and confer with their coaches. The swimmers breathe hard, staring, nodding, faces slack while they listen for something that will either reassure or congratulate. They ask whether they swam well enough to get a second swim, in other words, if they are in the top sixteen, which means a chance to race in the evening final.

  The latest technical suits are constricting and unbearable to wear for much longer than fifteen minutes. Between races, the women pull on training suits and yank their competition suit straps under their armpits before heading to the warm-down pool, or wear sports bras, keeping the tight suits at their hips. As I take notes, a swimmer beside me tucks a towel around his waist, and in a wiggling, pretzel-twisting matter of seconds, he has completely changed into his street clothes.

  Byron tells me a little bit about some of the better swimmers, stories of crazy parents, interteam love affairs, and burnout rates, I remark that when I swam with him at the University of Toronto I didn’t know half as much about my teammates.

  “Well, you were a bit of an outsider. You lived off campus, and you didn’t go to the parties. There are a lot of hours to fill at those varsity parties, you know.”

  I nod, decide not to mention I wasn’t invited.

  “You sit down next to someone at a party, they’re going to tell you a few things.”

  When I ask, Byron tells me about his own trajectory. After finishing sixth in the 100m butterfly at the 1972 Munich Olympics, he considered retiring, as most Olympians did after one Games. He explains that there are swimmers who do well because they love the sport, and swimmers who do well because they are talented; that though he had natural talent—his stroke was described as “near perfect”—he was one of the former. He stresses it is the love of the sport and training that elevates some swimmers above others. He likes to paraphrase something a baseball manager once said: “Swimming is my soul. I live it twenty-four hours a day and love it.”

  Instead of retiring, Byron swam for another four years, enjoying the travel opportunities, though missing placement on the 1976 Olympic Team. He had a degree in commerce from the University of Michigan, but eased seamlessly into coaching on the basis of his reputation as a swimmer.

  “Most coaches were high school teachers back then,” he says, shrugging. “There were only a handful of good coaches in the country.”

  • • •

  After prelims, I leave the bleachers and wander past a table selling plain hoodies, sweatshirts, and T-shirts. Next to the table is a rack of track pants, and flannel pajama bottoms covered in ladybugs, flowers, paw prints. On the walls and tabletop are a variety of heat transfers available to iron onto the clothing.

  The messages range from the challenging—I’ve been training mine off so I can kick yours; YES I’m a girl, YES I’m a swimmer, YES I’ll kick your butt; I CAN FLY, What’s Your Superpower?—to the defensive—Swimming is my life, DEAL WITH IT; Real swimmers don’t make excuses, they make waves; If swimming were any easier, it would be called hockey—to the inspirational monotone—Veni, Natavi, Vici, I came, I swam, I conquered; Canadian Swimmers Rule; and simply: I Love Swimming.

  The phrases look like bumper stickers, fonts of flirty italic and collegiate block, in palettes of pink, blue, and lime green. It is very assertive. It makes me apprehensive, but it is the language of belonging.

  • • •

  I look at the flannel pajama bottoms, pull out a pair of mauve ones covered in red ladybugs and white daisies. I wonder where I would wear them. The man be
hind the table tells me the hot-pink transfer would look good on them. He lays the fat word SWIMMING along one leg. I tell the man I will think about it.

  I walk away, seriously thinking about it, into the small pro shop across the hall. The walls are covered with flippers, pull buoys, caps, and goggles. Kickboards and nylon duffels sit high on shelves; a glass counter displays chamois, Swedish goggles, and special swimmers’ shampoo.

  Along one wall hang the bathing suits. The styles have changed since 1992. There are now endurance suits made of thicker material, bright training suits in psychedelic digital prints with thin straps and cutaway backs, competition suits in slick polyester blends, water-repellent fabrics with bonded seams and compression panels. I run my fingers along the suits. My heat transfer would say: I Put the Longing in Belonging. I consider a swimsuit in a blue-and-green-tartan pattern. I think of how itchy a woven wool tartan swimsuit would be.

  • • •

  Leaving the pool parking lot, I make a left into the wide street, heading for the highway. I can’t figure out the satellite radio dial, so I give up and let sound tracks choose me.

  Gordon Lightfoot: “Sundown.” Genesis: “Follow You.”

  It is overcast. The sedate landscape of bungalow housing and convenience plaza closes around my heart. My thinking is mushy again, my heat transfer reads: Home Is Where the Heart Is. I miss an exit and drive beneath several underpasses and along an airport service road, eventually finding my way back to a familiar street, recognizing the buff-colored apartment complex where my grandmother first lived after immigrating to Canada from the Philippines in 1974. Where she’d feed me homemade sugar doughnuts and fried plantains.

  I think of why I left swimming, left Toronto, left Canada. I know there are two sides, two lives, feel them acutely, not athlete and adult, but the life of the body and the life of the heart.

  I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational. About compromise, sacrifice, and breakup. The heart can suffer more than a few not-quites, have poor timing. We are outtouched by others, can psych ourselves out, we lose, win, become our results, find our place and rank.

  I think about loving swimming the way you love a country. The backseat of my father’s car, driving through Toronto’s older neighborhoods to see the Christmas lights. Framed photographs of a twenty-six-year-old Queen Elizabeth above classroom blackboards, ill-fitting wool coats and fur coats, ice-skate exchanges. A community center pool parking lot at four fifty-five a.m., where sleet makes the sound of brushed steel against a car door. A frozen rope clangs against a flagpole. (The door to the far left is unlocked; inside, warm, the pool lights flicker on in bays.) Ever present is the smell of chlorine, and the drifting of snow in the dark.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, Ken Whyte, Michael Schmelling, Byron MacDonald, Sarah Hochman, Helen Conford, Anna Jardine, Jason Fulford, Miranda Purves, Mark Lotto, Sheila Heti, Deirdre Dolan, Craig Taylor, Lorin Stein, Sara Angel, Friederike Schilbach, Richard McGuire, Mary Robertson, Mary Duenwald, Deborah Moggach, David Shipley, Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant, Luke Ingram, Rebecca Nagel, Pamela Baguley, Susanne Kippenberger, Niklas Maak, Ben Schott, Greg Weir, Mitch Ivey, François Laurin, Jim McMullan, USMS, Erin Sulpher and Melissa Sweet at Swimming Canada. Great love and thanks to James Truman, and deepest gratitude to my family, Lorna, Bob, and Derek Shapton.

  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?