Hi! Can You Still Swim? Part II

90.6 percent.

That's the percentage of registered MEMOs that participated in the recent PacMasters Championships, in Moraga last weekend.  Looking at some of my other competitors in the Medium Team division,  Santa Rosa checked in with 24.2 percent, while the winning Davis Aquatic Masters could only muster up a pitiful 6.5 percent.  If you figure that the more experienced swimmers are the ones that compete (except for yours truly's team), then DAM is sending just its superstars.  No wonder they won the Mediums.  We got our points the old-fashioned way -- we scraped them out in ones and twos, except for the ones I kinda hustled for (more later).

Masters relays, for competitions in 25-yard pools, are composed of age groups determined by the youngest member of the team.  Because I only had a couple of people 18-24, I often had to "borrow" from my 25+ team, and even once from my 45+ team to make a foursome of 18+ folks.  You'd think lots of 18-24s would still be swimming, as they're still relatively uninjured and often without kids.  But it takes awhile for most good age-group swimmers to miss swimming.  And it takes awhile for those who never swam to get injured running or biking, and thus turn to swimming.  Those are the two main categories of Masters swimmers -- ex-good kid swimmers, and beat-up runners/bikers.  There is a small window in their lives for healthy, wealthy triathletes to participate -- and I have a couple of those -- but it's like pulling teeth with tweezers to get those guys to do much besides their beloved mile.

I'd like to showcase the 18+  and the 25+ folks who participated in the meet.  My youngest kids!  Leading the way was Jason Corbett, 21, who was a friend of a MEMO, but of course is now in the fold.  Jason would've been in his senior year at Cal State Bakersfield, except for the fact that he's not.  With swimming injuries and a very reasonable desire to leave Bakersfield, he's back in the Bay Area.  You used to swim?  You're just what I'm looking for!  Jason split 1:00 in his 100 breast on the medley relay, which is not Division I caliber anymore, but definitely the fastest guy in the pool last weekend.  That time was faster than all but five of our 48 swimmers could even do going freestyle.  After his leg in the medley relay, which was the first event he swam as a MEMO, the 16 women who had just finished their medley relay came barging over to my table shouting "WHO WAS THAT BREASTSTROKER?" as though Ryan Lochte had parachuted into our pool and ripped off his tuxedo to reveal a pink Speedo.  Just because they had never seen him in workout before, or even ever in their entire lives, doesn't mean he can't cough up the USMS fee the night before.

I also had Francesca Ginocchio, who has three part-time jobs and must make several hundred a night in tips in her gig as the most beautiful bartender in the Bay Area.  Francesca has a flair for butterfly (which is a blessing and a curse, as you then have to train for it), and had a fantastic swim in the women's relay and her individual events.  Newest California driver's license holder Yuri Nishizawa came on Sunday, after many weeks of non-training (that will prove to be a unifying theme with many of my MEMOs), and still managed a respectable few events and even-better relay legs.  She ended with the 1000, and then undoubtedly practiced DWE (Driving While Exhausted).  Brian Poggetti also staffed the young 'uns group.  Brian swims with the Nooners, and decided that the thousands of yards he has swum since joining would be just the thing he needed to sign up for . . . only the 50 free.  Sigh.  Next year, Brian!  And your wife too!  She's good, I can tell that.

Also in the 25+ group were experienced ex-swimmers (Yusef Freeman, Sarah Stretch, Tara Stoop, as well as Brian Berry and Nia Doyle [both of whom I mentioned in my previous post]) and novices John Han and Leilani Castro.  Yusef gave me perhaps my best memory of the entire meet when he gave me a huge shout-out after their awesome 400 free relay team almost defeated the 18+ group from Walnut Creek.  Thank goodness I kept it together because I almost burst into tears.  Having a 16-year-old at home I never get thanked for anything, much less appreciated.  The last time anyone at the pool called my name from 25-yards away it was followed by "don't forget to turn off the pool lights."

Because Jason was on that relay team we had to call ourselves 18+, even with our magnificent 42-year-old anchor, Dave Barber. The closeness of that race defied those ages.  Yusef later said that it was way more fun being on a team at a meet like this, then swimming your events alone.  So true.  Yusef had a great age-group career in swimming that tailed to an end in college, but thank goodness he never really burned out.  It's still something that he and many other MEMOs are good at, so they keep on doing it. It's hard when work takes you all over the country.  You're always just getting into shape when you take off for a week or two.  But we can't be picky after awhile.  Any day of swimming is a good day.

I had the great joy of coaching and teaching Tara in high school, as well as coaching her for a year on the Laney College swim team.  She is someone that returned after having two kids (impossible to tell that from looking at her) and a busy job.  At 34, Tara is the age when many people start looking in the mirror and wanting more.  Sometimes it's because the kids sap so much "me" out of a person, and sometimes you just want to start taking better care of yourself.  Tara scored in both of her events and was on a second-place relay with Jason, Yusef, and Yuri.  Tara was also one of several swimmers who brought their spouse, family, kids, and/or friends to watch.  That is just sooo cute!  It's great that they're proud of their activity, and I love it when people introduce me to their family.  I always get "I've heard so much about you," which I just generally assume to be a compliment.  That's true, right?

Sarah Stretch coaches the Women's Swim Team at Laney College, a job that I had ten years ago.  Besides being eternally grateful to Sarah for joining me, I'm happy that she got a chance to see what it was like being a swimmer again.  It might give her a little more insight into some things that her swimmers may be feeling as they approach their championship meet next week.  We coaches all know that stuff, but we forget.  Sarah swam with a shoulder that needed icing for days afterward, which puts a little crimp in her style when she teaches boot camp and plays in a soccer league besides training for this meet.  Despite the fact that I wouldn't play in a soccer league if someone paid me in trucks of gold bullion, we faced a lot of similar problems with our teams at Laney.  I am happy to see how great the Laney team has turned out since Sarah took over.  Let's hope she stays active forever and doesn't turn out like me, who has now resorted to parking far away from things and hoping that might be considered aerobic exercise.

And finally my novices John and Leilani.  John was easier to convince, especially after he purchased the parka.  When you look the part it's easier to go to a meet.  When you've got a grocery bag and a mismatched set of bath towels, you just know you don't belong.  But John swam a fine 500 free on Saturday, and joined a great men's medley relay.  John swam high school in Oakland (I think), which is a little like saying you're a fine water-skier in Death Valley.  Masters meets are completely different from any other competition.  The officials generally wait while people meander to the blocks, and the rules are different slightly, to adapt to the stroke modifications some folks make as they age.  I think that John enjoyed it.  Most people would say that the meet is welcoming, once they get used to the two-races-happening-at-once thing.  It's kind of like a track meet, when sometimes you don't know who to watch.  I got fooled as a coach several times.  The worst was when Yusef, who is 6-5 and about the only Black guy in the pool, swam directly in front of me in his 100 IM and I never even looked up.

Leilani, at under five feet tall, was easier to miss, but I didn't.  She was at her first meet ever, and I was worried that she wouldn't enjoy herself.  Most of the rest had gone to a practice meet a couple weeks before.  It took plenty of convincing by me and all her 6 a.m. lanemates to get her to enter, but she did.  Still working on her diving technique, she gamely swam two freestyle races and a 50 backstroke, as well as two relays.  That 50 backstroke sprouted at least a dozen more grey hairs in my head, as Leilani routinely turns over (disqualifying herself) just about every single lap of her life.  Thank goodness she crashed into the wall at her finish.  I've never been so happy to see that before.

Sorry for the length.  That's it for the young folk.  35 and over is coming next.

Hi! Can You Still Swim? Part I

Time to call in some favors, and it turned out pretty dang well.

Jut finished the PacMasters Championships with my awesome team MEMO.  The three-day meet was held at the awesome Soda Aquatic Center, on the campus of Campolindo High School in Moraga, under drizzly, cold, and only occasionally sunny conditions.  I recruited the heck out of all my 6 a.m. and noon swimmers, getting 41 of them to sign up.  I also got the very fastest of my colleagues at Laney (Sarah Stretch), one of another colleague's swimmers (Michael Kellenback), a guy I've been coaching remotely in LA (Dave Barber) who came up for this meet, Danielle Ruymaker's pal (Jeff Everett), who totally fit the bill for a fast guy over 50, Yusef Freeman's fantastic neighbor (Andrew Naber), Brian Berry's assistant coach at Castro Valley HS (Jason Corbett -- see below), and one of my old teammates from the 80s (Brian Patterson), who I found while trolling the Internet the night before the last day of the meet.

Every day brought new fears that no one would show up, and I rejoiced when every single person strolled in, like a lunatic who was seeing family again after being released from prison.  All but one showed up.  Most came on time.  Most had their suits.  Brought my husband's swim bag in case he had to rip off his official's whites and dive in.  (And thank goodness that didn't happen, because I really had to dangle an extremely big favor.)  We had a couple of DQs, a few NSs, and several near misses.  But much joy.

I have to say that losing the Coach of the Year wasn't particularly traumatizing.  The voting was just held too early.  If it had been held one minute into this meet I would have walked away with it, carried on the shoulders of my team (well, maybe 5-6 really strong guys), while rose petals were strewn about and big long trumpets were blown.

I had so many favorite moments from this meet that it just doesn't seem right to single out any one person to celebrate.  But I'm going to pick out a few first, and then hit everyone in the next post.  This may be long.  Feel free to stop when you need a snack, or just when you get to your own name.

Robert Inchausti
After doing the One Hour Postal in January, Robert was a changed man.  He was faster, more consistent, and seemed to take more interest in swimming in general.  But getting to the starting blocks proved a little challenging.  He completely missed the 50 freestyle, reporting to the wrong side of the pool, and was seconds away from missing one of his best events, the 100 breast.  With Heat 1 finishing up I finally found him right behind me just as the referee was about to blow his whistle signaling the start of the race. "Run!" I said, and away he went.  He tore around the pool, down the length, and across to Lane 8 where I was frantically signaling him to stop, like I was out on a runway at SFO as an out-of-control tanker was maydaying it in seconds before it exploded over a populated area.  The referee whistled the swimmers up.  Robert put on his goggles, kicked off his sandals, and was about to step up on the blocks when he realized he was still wearing a shirt.  He ripped it off like a stripper as the music swelled, stepped up, dove in, and swam one heck of a race.  First 100 breast ever.  Seventh place.  Two points for Team MEMO.  Readily agreed to swim the 100 butterfly in the Medley Relay after that, which considering the circumstances, was like taking candy from a baby.


Tanya Mahn
High Point scorer for Team MEMO.  45 points of awesomeness.  200 butterfly, best time as a Masters swimmer.  Doing it again after an age group career filled with 200 butterflys, doing it after never wanting to do another 200 fly again.  But after coming back to swimming again and getting back in shape, the love for that event and the challenge it represented proved too irresistible.  With the whole team cheering her on at each turn, she broke the 3:00 barrier, got out like a champion (after flipping me off to the delight of the crowd), and completely held it together all the way.  She went on to swim another 100 fly in the relay, not long after, and then won the 1000 freestyle after almost all the team had packed up and gone home.  Big day.  Big meet.  Big comeback.

Brian Berry
Another 200 flyer, but completely different.  Brian had never done a 200 fly before, but had read my memo about the best way to score points (doing the most painful events possible) and signed up.  He was having a pretty good day on Sunday, after a really good day on Saturday.  The 200 fly was coming up and Brian was having second thoughts.  Actually he was only having one thought:  Get me the heck outta here!  I'm not doing this!!  What was I thinking??  With several other MEMOs, we talked him into it, though we weren't completely sure until we saw him standing behind the blocks.  It wouldn't have surprised me at all to see him hiding in a stall in the men's bathroom, and then strolling out pretending  he really wanted to swim but "had to go."  He swam a what might best be described as really conservative 200 fly, and got sixth with three points.  Brian's other major contribution was finding one of my unfreakinbelieveable ringers, Jason Corbett, who completely classed the place up.  If Jason needs a bunch of 40-50 year old girlfriends, he need not worry about where to look.


Susie Haufler

Point person for my unsuccessful campaign for Coach of the Year.  Slacked off at work drafting my nomination packet, coordinated my unbelievably generous team gift, scored 24 points at the meet while scoring in all six events, was on an awesome winning relay team (Women's 400 Free Relay, 45+), came on Friday just to help swim a relay, and was an awesome all-around facilitator and great teammate.  Susie and I swam together 25 years ago, but she has defied aging where I have cartwheeled into the bin of "wow, she's really let herself go" former athletes.  Ran into her in the locker room after my pitiful 400 IM, as she was trying on two-pieces because she's still totally hot.

Megumi Ozawa and Nia Doyle
I've got to stop at five people, but I can't.  Both Megumi and Nia swam with unbelievable injuries and
amazing discomfort.  Megumi got one of the many colds wracking our team last month, and tore the muscle connecting her ribs while coughing.  Every deep breath hurt.  Every stroke.  Pretty much every movement.  She swam the 50 backstroke in 31.95, which is so amazingly fast that only two of our guys beat her -- and barely.  She won the 200 backstroke.  She swam four relays and four events.  No complaints ever.

Nia hurt her shoulder and can't lift her arm above her head except at an angle of around 50 degrees.  She can't throw her arms overhead to dive, nor can she bring them up to leave the wall in a streamline.  She figured out how to do freestyle with one arm normal and the other at 50 degrees, so that she swims resembling a guy with his foot asleep.  She pushes off turns with one arm up and the other down, which is so awesomely clever it will now be called the Nia Turn.  But she swam the 500 (sixth) and the 1000 (third), just because she knew that she could do it and that she could score points for MEMO.  Amazingly enough, she entered the 50 free (which she won last year when healthy), and beat three people to score in eighth place.  She started in the water.  Everyone else dived in.

I'm going to stop for a break myself.  Woohoo -- Income Taxes, what fun!  But I'll be back with Part 2. What a great job I have.

IM Not Very Prepared

Some random thoughts after completing my 400 IM today at the PacMasters Championship:

On its way, after my 400 IM

• 
  
• Damn, that's a long way.
• After completing the 100 butterfly it got much easier, in the same way you feel better when the bull leaves after goring you in Pamplona. 
• I kept meaning to train for this, but didn't.
• It's a good thing this keyboard is low and my chair is high, because my arms cannot raise above elbow height for the rest of the evening.
• When thinking about a seed time, I figured out what was about the most embarrassing and ridiculous four splits a person could do.  And I just about nailed it.
• After the race I ate a coach's lunch that had been sitting around for at least an hour and was cold and congealed.  It appeared to be pasta in Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, with a can of catfood mixed in.  I scarfed it down like the Grand Champion in a hotdog eating contest on the 4th of July.
• When you are just resting the entire 100 backstroke leg, you can make out lots of interesting clouds overhead.
• The suit size I usually buy now leaves marks like I've been tied to a chair and tortured for information.
• My philosophy in the race was to not get disqualified, and to score points for my team.  Perhaps "race" was too lofty a description of what I did.
• If the 400 IM is the decathlon of swimming, then I'm someone the next Olympics would pick to do a feature on, since it is evident I come from an underprivileged country with no knowledge of modern training methods, good dietary practices, or competent skin care.
• I didn't warm up enough, but mainly because the yardage was tiring me out.
• I didn't warm down enough, mainly because I couldn't swim another stroke.
• It's amazing how muscle memory just stays with you.  I put on my swim cap exactly the same way I did when I was really fast.
• I think I made a lot of people feel good about themselves today, especially those people who used to have to step up their game because I was in their heat. 

But mainly I learned that you get what you deserve.  And that even bad swimming is a wonderful thing.

Kick Me When I'm Down

So I'm sitting at the computer, watching from the window my neighbor run a boot camp for the locals, and I'm thinking wow -- he's slow, she really can't do a pushup, they make spandex in that size?  Which is ironic because, you know, I'm just sitting here at the computer. But hey, once a coach always a coach.

Today my task is to imput entries from the national postal event that I created, the 400 Kick For Time.  It's a competition open to all registered United States Masters Swimmers, where they just send in their results and a program sorts the data into age groups and placings.  I mail out the awards, t-shirts for those who want them, cash their checks and receive the glory.

Except that it's kinda labor intensive, on my part.  And I'm not even kicking.

So you can enter online, where with a few clicks of your finger all is done.  Entry accepted, all forms of credit accepted, safe and secure. Or,  you can send in a check (except for the four-and-counting that forgot, sigh), fill out your paper entry form (but don't really try to print legibly because you don't know how to hold a pen anymore), and then be over the age of 18 and still not know how to fold a letter-size piece of paper in freakin THIRDS.

I'm a little tense.  Maybe watching the joggers will help.

Once I correctly imput all the data, then the program will sort out the winners.  And it turns out that over half the people like to mail in their entries.  Who knew?  My deal with the computer brain people is a $100 flat fee plus five percent of the credit card processing.  Maybe a quarter of the folks buy a $20 shirt and the rest cough up only the $10 entry fee.  So I lose between 50 cents and a buck fifty for every online entry.  Which, now in retrospect, is not only fine but would make me really very, very happy.

It's fun to see the entries coming from all over the country, Alaska to Connecticut, and it's fun to see how fast some people really are at this event.  This is a low-key way to compete, that's for sure.  Mail in your time and receive your prize the next month.  No shivering or sweltering at a meet for the better part of a weekend, no scary competition setting, no pressure to make the time standard.  Just kick, at your local pool, with someone timing you.

I've gotten lots of emails too.  Some are asking for clarification on the rules, others suggesting new rules (yeah, thanks buddy!) or asking about the shirt in detail before they decide to squeeze out a twenty. Are t-shirts even being made in polyester anymore?  Do you realize this event originates in the Bay Area?  It's all free-range, non-bullied cotton here, baby.

So back to work.  Paper entries must be received by January 17, so I have a few more days of data imput.  Good luck to all of you who entered.  And if you haven't, please use the online entry form next year.  Or learn to fold in thirds.

Trading Families

It's good to get out, once in awhile. It's not that I miss picking up after the family (no way!), or making lunch, or doing laundry -- which is kinda like a dream job. But when I got the chance to be on the coaching staff of the Western Zones All Star team in Grand Junction, Colorado, I jumped. It was six days of coaching, small talk, meetings, nagging, chaperoning, bus and airplane riding, and lots and lots of waiting. It was six days of the world's worst food too, but eating to win wasn't quite as important for the coaches.

The meet is a competition between all the United States Swimming All Star teams located in the West. There were over a dozen zones present (California has several, while some other states combine to make one); I was with Pacific. The host team Colorado won, beating us narrowly, 1,543-1,536.5, due to their superior altitude lungs (Grand Junction is 4,593 elevation). I was in charge of Pacific's 13-14 boys, a hardy subgroup of humankind that eats vast quantities of anything on plates, napkins and/or carpeting, and loves superheroes and the thought of girls -- but not actual girls.

I spent a little of my free time going from Zone to Zone, recruiting for next year's Maccabi Games in Israel -- where I am also coaching. That is a meet for Jewish athletes, and more about that in another post. But I'd go up to all the coaches from the other Zones and ask if they had any Jewish kids that were fast, who would consider applying to Team USA. Let's just say pickings were slim. One lady from Utah (in retrospect, that was a longshot) actually knew a Jewish swimmer, which made her quite pleased. So there were no Jews, no non-Whites except for us, and no Peet's Coffee. I was the only married coach from Pacific and the only one with a teenager. My roommate just graduated from college.

Grand Junction was very hot and surrounded by the beautiful uplift known as Colorado National Monument, though we were inside at Colorado Mesa University. We got a few short tours of the area by our bus driver, a budding and yet terrible tour guide named Charlotte. Other days we got the near-toothless Crazy Man bus driver, who on the last day hugged all the kids while I watched horrified from afar, like seeing a car go through a plate glass window. Colorado is also one of the big "swing states", and we were blanketed with advertising for both presidential candidates. A Romney bus was parked in our hotel parking lot a couple of days, but I'm pretty sure it was just filled with staffers, because even one bite of those eggs would've brought his campaign to a quick end. Obama also flew into town while we were there, delaying the Crazy Toothless Man bus.

Like most of Pacific Swimming (and team Hawaii), my group was predominantly Asian. Living in the Bay Area and teaching at Laney College, it felt normal. All but two of my daughter's friends are Asian, and except for her current obsession with all things British, she is a future Asian history major (sigh). My group of boys was super-Asian, as they all could do all the things that one ever sees Asians excelling at. Swim fast -- check. Build computers -- check. Play Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven -- check. Take pre-calc in 8th grade -- check. Rubik's Cube under a minute -- check. Quiet on the outside, party on the inside -- check. Those are so my-kind-of-people I could just weep.

On All Star teams you get a pile of free clothing which you wear in a rotating order, like attending an incredibly fit Catholic school without having to roll up your skirt. We'd go to breakfast wearing the shirt of the day, where we'd see the same "eggs" in the chafing dish, and then gather in the lobby before boarding the bus to the pool. On the way to the lobby was a baby grand piano where, on the red-shirt day, one of my boys sat down and whipped out the first movement of a Mozart concerto. As we walked to the bus I asked him if he'd studied the Suzuki method, as my daughter had when she learned to play violin. He said not for piano, but he did with the violin. So that's nice that he can do both. And be at the freakin All Star meet.

The next day (blue shirt) saw the same eggs and same walk to the lobby. The junior Mr. Rubik sits down and plays something equally majestic. However, he doesn't also play violin. In school he sits first chair clarinet. On white-shirt day yet another kid sits and plays equally amazingly. He's the one in pre-calc. He finaled in all his events. To be fair, I did have a couple of non-Asian kids, one of which was a budding frat boy inside a 6-2 frame, with phenomenal good looks, and the other two were loveable dorks. But the quieter kids are just easier for me to relate to.

Due to a weird bit of scheduling I was on different flights in and out of Oakland from my 13-14 boys. Who wouldn't like to report to OAK at 3:30 am? And sign me up for the fabulous 10 pm return flight, when my real family and I were leaving for vacation 11 hours later. I didn't have any laundry to do when I got home (red, white and blue Pacific Swimming shirts were not so valued on vacay), but I had to water the plants outside in the dark, check the home answering machine, and make up some quality cat time for a few hours. Did you need to save all the junk mail for me, really? And the rubber bands from the morning paper?

In Hawaii I did miss the 13-14 boys a little, though I was glad to be back with my real family. We did take the bus around the island, but no toothless crazy man was at the wheel. The only sign of politics was the bobblehead Obama doll wearing a lei and beach clothes, giving us the hang loose sign. No one can sit down and play piano concertos in my real family, but the breakfast was way better. And it's back to the home team.

Is That a Scythe in Your Backseat or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Much of my time parenting a teenager is spent thinking of her feelings, empowering her to speak up for herself, and trying to replace the word "no" with "yes" whenever possible. HAHAHA! Help me, I can't get up -- my side has split from laughter and my spleen is rolling down the stairs!

No, most of my time is spent embarrassing her (okay, often accidentally), teasing her, and nagging at her to do all the things any reasonable human being would do, if they only had hygienic standards equal to those in a refugee camp in Sudan. And it's really easy for me to embarrass her because it's so fun. I mean, who doesn't love doing the arm movements to Y-M-C-A, while singing along? On BART. I'm not completely insensitive, you know. I'm there when she needs me, blah, blah, blah. But when you've got an overachieving kind of kid, I consider it my duty to make sure she doesn't come off as a know-it-all, and change the benevolent dictatorship (which seems to work quite well) into a tail-wagging-the-dog family dynamic.

Which leads me to the scythe in my backseat.

Among the many things in my late father's house are vintage tools. There are woodworking tools, blacksmithing stuff, machining equipment, and farm implements. He was born on a farm in South Dakota, before the Great Depression, and so I guess he collected the scythe as some sort of memory-inducing device. The other tools he probably actually used, as his hobby was restoring antique cars. But the 6-foot scythe, with a 24-inch blade -- not so much. I'd been walking around it, carefully (cue rimshot), for over a year, and decided it had to go.

I knew the perfect place. My wonderful Masters team, MEMO, swims on Sundays at Shadow Cliffs Regional Park, and afterwards we often go out to eat as a group. We found a great breakfast/lunch place near the lake called Jim's. After only a dozen or so times of eating the restaurant down to the foundation (open water swimming appears to increase the appetite), I noticed all the antique tools nailed to his walls. This would make Jim's look even toolier.

So the last time I went to my dad's house (with one of my Masters swimmers, Jane, who unbelievably seemed to enjoy seeing all this stuff), I took it home. Of course it sat in the car for a week because the handle was too long and the blade was too well packed under the passenger seat to remove it and then put it back in. So I drove my daughter around for a week with a scythe handle sticking up in the backseat, like some sort of Grim Reaper Convention attendee. We went to swim practice (careful of your bag, honey -- watch out for the scythe!), my job (where I hid the handle under newspapers, as not to be surrounded by the Oakland SWAT team), the grocery store, the gun dealer (more things from my dad's house, but best left for another blog), Target, Michael's, the Post Office, etc. It was always easy to find my car.

Of course my daughter was mortified that the scythe was always in the backseat. Weird things seem to bother 15-year-olds, I guess. Photoshopping yourself into a picture with the members of the band One Direction and then posting it on Instagram, however, is really cool. She sat in the front seat with me for the week, headphones on, trying to make herself invisible while I cheerfully explained the Story of the Scythe to anyone who parked next to me at lots all across the Bay Area.

And what does this all have to do with my Swimming Life? Not that much, really. But embarrassing my daughter is a little like how I act when I'm coaching. I just try to make all my swimmers laugh. I tease them like my daughter, in hopes of making them feel recognized; I nag them to improve their strokes and work harder. I do this not because I don't want them getting big heads, but because it's pretty hard getting up at 5:30 every morning and driving to the pool. It's got to be entertaining; it's got to be be fun; and you've got to feel good about yourself afterwards. Helping people to get a great workout is fine, but it's more than just designing clever sets and correcting strokes. Coaching adds the little bit of parenting that most people want. Young man, young man, are you listening to me? Young man, young man, what do you wanna be? Not the grim reaper, for sure. Just happy to be swimming.

My Cup Runneth Over

I was filling out my daughter's application for the North American Challenge Cup last week, a big international all-star meet for juniors that happens each year in early August, when I realized that forms just aren't what they used to be. Long gone are the days when a scribbled index card in your best imitation of mom's handwriting could excuse you from Algebra. Not that I know that from personal experience.

There were at least 20 pages in the damn thing, and it included consent to have their picture taken, consent to have their name published in the results, consent to travel, signing of USA Swimming's Honor Code, complete medical history, order form for swag, food preferences, passport info and photocopy, times achieved out of our "zone," coach's cell phone, emergency

contacts, photocopy of insurance card, and finally, notarized signatures from both parents. Why you need to have this notorized signature is baffling, considering that only a saintly parent who spent many hours in labor agony would sit there for three hours filling out these forms in the first place.

So up and down the stairs I went, printing out times that were swum in Southern California, digging up the passports, finding phone numbers of relatives, dentists, doctors, and her swim coach, making copies, and rooting around for the immunization log. Of course once I find that log, I then have to google (again) which abbreviation means tetanus because there are like three diseases that could possibly be it. Then it's on to checking on sizes of all clothing, and figuring out which clothing is still the correct size because it has totally stretched out and which is really legit. I thought I totally knew the gimme question, sandwich preference, until I found out that sometime during the last year "nobody" eats turkey.

So then it was time for my daughter to sign off on her pages, me to sign after her, (print name, sign name, date), and then the notary to drive the stake in the overkill machine's heart. And just to make it even more complicated, when I was filling this stuff out my husband was a couple days post-surgery for a repair to a hole in his eye's macula.

The surgery itself was quite clever, where a gas bubble was inserted into the eye to squish the hole closed, like a bandaid keeps a cut together until it heals tightly. But the macula is in the front of the eye, so the bubble needed to be in the back of the eye at all times, until the hole had a chance to heal. Whatever you do, don't google the macular hole eye surgery video unless you are well past dinner time. Trust me. The point of this digression is that my husband had to recover completely face down for seven days and nights, 24/7. He had a special chair with a massage table head-holder and a tray to look down onto. Also from Vitrectomy Rentals (talk about specialty businesses), was a double mirror to watch TV.

So husband spent most of his time face down, with a silver patch over one eye, looking into a double mirror watching every "guy" movie available at our local library. World War II, Westerns, Steve McQueen, and any comedy where someone farts or gets hit in the crotch were big hits. After another hour spent googling mobile notaries and getting nothing, I had the inspiration of calling our neighborhood realtor, who graciously came by with his notary book to help us out. He walked in only to find a house in complete chaos (a decline from our normal 70 percent chaos), a man with an eyepatch staring face down into a mirror, machine guns going off through the speakers, and a dining room table overflowing with papers, printouts, vaccination records, copies, and eyedrops. Welcome to our home!

Doing an extrapolation back from the face down man before him, whose parrot had obviously just flown away with the bottle of rum, to the picture on my husband's driver's license went more quickly than I thought.

Then it was bundling everything up, writing a check for our share of the trip, and driving down to San Jose to turn it all in because it was too late to mail as I had neglected to read the page about the notary before I began filling it out. And now it's wait till Wednesday until we hear if this has all been in vain.