Passover or Pass Out: Decisions, Decisions

We observed the first night of Passover last Wednesday by having a seder at the home of my childhood friend, Jack. Though Jack has moved to LA, he returns nearly ever year to have this nice family-oriented (vs. synagogue-oriented) holiday at home. Jack's parents are both deaf, and Jack and his brother interpret for us when we can't figure out what's happening. My sign vocabulary includes the numbers 1-10, the alphabet, and about ten words (which include the names of the swimming strokes, which is generally not useful during dinner).

There are lots of nice things about Passover and many silly ones. Participating in traditions which have been happening for over 5000 years is generally cool, but Manischewitz wine is really nasty stuff. You are supposed to drink four cups of this stuff during the meal. We settle for four sips at the appropriate times. Jack and his family actually PREFER this winelike beverage, when there are actually wonderful kosher wines available -- even a winery in Napa. We start the meal with bowls of matzah ball soup. And that reminds me of a joke:

A Texan non-Jew came to New York for the first time, having never tasted Jewish food. On the recommendation of a friend, he went to the Lower East Side to eat at a real Jewish restaurant. He looked at a menu, but everything on it was strange and new and he simply didn't know what to order. When the waitress came, he pointed to a dish on another table and asked what it was.

The waitress replied, "That's matzo-balls".

"OK," said the Texan, "I'll have that."

He got his dish, and was finishing it with relish when the waitress came back again. He looked up and said: "Ma'am, that was truly delicious. I never had anything like this before. Tell me, do you serve any other parts of the matza?"

Seders generally go on and on and on, with the story of Passover read collectively in a booklet called a haggadah. There are songs, prayers, even questions to discuss, all relating to the departure from Egypt of the Israelites.

The hard part this year was that the first night of Passover was on a Wednesday. Seders are most commonly held on the first night of Passover (or several nights, if you can take it) and the next day was a work day for me. Getting home at 9:30 and then herding the family to bed (one bathroom for all of us) meant that I didn't get to sleep until almost 10:30.

I was wiped out the next day at work. I feel so lucky that my students come when they're tired because it really is almost inhuman to wake up that early day after day. And I know that many of my students are tired all the time. I have new parents, insomniacs, people who work late, students with homework, shift workers, and even problem-free people who just want to see a little TV.

When I was training hard and that alarm used to go off four mornings a week at 4:30 a.m. it was just as hard. Now this is my job, people depend on me, and I feel completely dedicated to not letting my morning crowd down. Back then it was just my decision, the coach and the other swimmers on my team would be there with or without me. I started calling 4:30 a.m. my "Championship Moment." Answering that call was what made me a champion, regardless of the effort I put out that morning in workout.

As a swimmer I was almost overwhelmed with worries around Taper Time, the immediate couple of weeks before the season's "big" meet. I worried about my preparation, my mental toughness, the pain-to-be, the fit of my suit, the timing of the events, what to pack and eat, how much sleep I could get in before I left, the weather, disappointing my coach, everything. But having had my "Championship Moment" and pushing through that always gave me comfort.

I thought about that when I woke up on the night after the Seder. It wasn't exactly the same circumstances, but it helped. If it's true that 99 percent of life is just showing up, it is even more work for those of us who have to show up before dawn.

Won't That Leave a Mark on Your Chest?

My daughter is the Pacific Swimming, Junior Olympic, Short Course, 11-12 Girls, 2009, 1650 Champion!

Despite slacking off the middle 500, terrible foot-placement on all 65 flip turns (where I had to steady myself repeatedly not to jump in), and a left hand extension that just causes my eye to twitch -- she beat all comers last Sunday, and proudly wore her medal all night. Wouldn't it be nice if we all could show our happiness so proudly?

I guess there's an age limit for that kind of joy. When adults do things like that everyone thinks they're completely deluded. I know a woman who is a PhD and constantly refers to herself as "Dr. Beth." Please, spare us all. You're either a professor or a therapist, and either way it's fine but just not worth bragging about.

We go every year to the Santa Clara International Invitational Swim Meet as spectators. Michael Phelps, Natalie Coughlin, etc. are among the regulars. Shortly after each race they have a medal ceremony for the first three finishers. After the official pictures are taken those three can't get their medals off fast enough. It would be a source of unending ridicule if they were to walk around with that medal still hanging from their necks. Put it away, if you want to know how I did just check the results. That's what cool is for me.

My husband is an Administrative Law Judge. Those judges are not in the Judicial branch of the State of California, but rather in the Administrative branch (duh). Because of this classification he is not officially able to do such genteel duties as perform marriages, etc. He can however, take away your license to do business and thus make a living (you pathetic losers) or deny you a license in the first place.

But like all citizens, he may purchase a license to serve as a marriage official for one specific day, between only one previously named couple, in one particular county in California. Which he did last weekend. He officiated at the marriage of his nephew in lovely Carmel-by-the-Sea (note the foreshadowing of the three ridiculous hyphens). After consulting with one of his co-workers who had performed many such ceremonies, he found vows that were agreeable to all. When it came to the question of his attire, the wedding couple asked him to wear his judicial robe.

His co-worker said that in all of the ceremonies he had ever performed in his life, he had never received that request. I think the nephew and wife wanted it to look more show-offey. Here's a real judge and we are related! (Don't look too closely at the one-day permit in his briefcase!)

There are things I'd like to have, but I just never got into the status style of living. Don't want a better house. Don't crave fast cars. Same with purses, little purebred dogs, expensive wines (but don't forget: "Buy one bottle, get the second for 5 cents!"), fancy kitchens, and vacations to places in the Indian Ocean (when you're asleep on the beach, is it really that much better than Hawaii? Or Capitola?).

What makes it okay for my daughter to show off her medal but not the swimmers at Santa Clara? Why do we laugh at Dr. Beth who signs off on her carpooling emails like she's submitting her CV? Why do we roll our eyes at the wedding couple? What's the cutoff age for bragging? I think my daughter will just know when. I hope so. Then I'll get a chance to wear that medal around the house.

MEET SANCTION NUMBER PC9-033 03/20/09 THRU 03/22/09

F I N A L M E E T R E S U L T S =========================================================

EVENT 103 WOMENS OPEN 1650 FREE EVENT

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SWIMMERS NAME AGE ....T E A M..... PRELIM TIME FINAL PLC

BENJAMIN, MIRIAM 12 PC WALNUT CREEK 19:42.35 1

The Good, The Bad, and the I'm-Just-Here-For-The-Exercise

Sometimes I think I've just seen it all.

I had the psychic with three-foot wings tattooed on her back; I had the observant Muslim woman swimming while completely clothed. I had an endangered brown pelican swimming in my pool and two rats (one dead, one alive) and a field mouse. I've had parolees, deaf students, transgenders, doctors and judges. I've coached doulas and flight attendants who both leap out of the pool when their phone goes off; lawyers and MBAs who cut class when it's going to be a hard day, and diabetics, epileptics, and asthmatics galore. I've had every variation of spelling on the names Megan/Meaghan/Meagan and pronounciation of the name Tara (Tar-uh, Tare-uh -- unfortunately both in the same class). I currently have a Daniel, Danny and Dan on the rollbook. I have two students in their 70s and two students who I coached in previous decades, who now have two children of their own.

But I still feel bad when someone has a bad day.

Daniel had a bad day today. He couldn't hold his stroke together, and flailed around like he was shoveling desperately against a collapsing sand cave. My daughter had a bad swim on Sunday, breathing every stroke for two laps of her 100 freestyle.

Excuses? Daniel stayed up till midnight, so he's got that going for him. Unfortunately his lanemate completely kicked his ass, which made it even worse since they compete every day. My daughter? I told her to remember that the 100 free (and the 50) are sprint events -- almost not the same stroke as her distance events, though of course they're both freestyle. She has to get used to breathing for distance and breathing for sprinting but she can't get it.

So I tell people that every day you either Look Good, Feel Good, or Try Good. If you don't "Look" or "Feel" at least you can "Try" -- right? Not always. I've given up correcting several people, who are just too hard-headed to change. I think they just like the way they are. Someone's buying all those self-help books, right? Don't want to learn new things. Nod politely then go back to the same old same old. I'm just here . . . for the exercise.

Why don't you just stab me in the heart? It's insulting. Do you go to Farrallon and ask for a grilled cheese sandwich? The Mazarati dealer and ask for an in-dash cassette? Breathe. In. Out. Okay, I'm fine.

It's too bad when people have a bad day, but then I really am reminded how much I love my job. It's easy to coach people when they're going fast -- everyone is happy. One order of hugs all around. When someone is slow, it's time to put things in perspective for them. You are not your swim. Just figure out what happened, and try to fix it. No one has a perfect swim, at least not one that can not be improved on later.

It's so much better to have a bad swim and feel bad than not to feel anything at all. Look at it this way, Daniel.

Swimming Blues

Not swimming at all, is more like it.

I haven't been in the water since January, 2008. I'd taken my customary Holiday month-plus off, to try to get on top of everything family, and went for a workout one day at my local pool. It had been awhile since I swam and I felt slow in the water, so I put on my monster paddles (no wimp paddles for me -- bring on the dinner plates!) to try to hold some water.

It was a couple of weeks before I got in again and this time my shoulder hurt. So I thought I'd let it rest for awhile. After a couple months of this it never seemed to get better. I went to my doctor, who gave me a referral to an Orthopedist. He took an x-ray and scheduled me for an MRI.

Now I was certainly cool! The best part of that was casually saying to my friends, "Yeah, I'm scheduled for an MRI next week." I felt like a member of the 49ers! It was all I could do to not call the local TV stations and have them report on me. In the old days people used to say, "I'm going down to Cabo for the holiday," or "Loved it at the spring show in Milan," or "That horribly depressing film at Sundance really has Oscar buzz all over it," or "That reminds me of the color of the moon during the eclipse in Tierra del Fuego."

Now it's really all about injuries. And you aren't anything unless you have an Orthopedist who spells it "Orthopoedist" and claims to be a physician to a major Bay Area sports team. Bingo, I had both!

So the diagnosis was negative for anything torn. Good, I guess. But by that time I'd acquired "Frozen Shoulder" which made putting my hand on the steering wheel, and even sleeping tough. I had two complicated sleep positions. The first involved one arm by my side and the other one bent by my face, which looked a lot like a body that had just been thrown by the side of the road. My other position involved laying on my side with a pillow under my arm and resembled a kidnapping victim stuffed in the trunk of a car.

I went to physical therapy for awhile, but the passive-aggressive receptionist and the $4.50 parking really put a crimp in my motivation. So now I'm doing it on my own. We'll see how this develops.

I miss swimming. I miss being a swimmer. I miss skin that smells like chlorine and really clean feet, and not having to wash my hair at home. I miss flip turns and streamlines and leaving on the top. Sometimes going to the pool at Laney College each day to coach makes it better, because all my swimmers are doing it for me. But sometime it makes it worse, because I miss it so much.

Wetsuit/Normal

I vote for normal.

I just came back from watching my husband and daughter swim at Lake Berryessa this morning. There were hundreds and hundreds of people swimming, broken up into "waves" of categories which allowed a more manageable pack. I first did this swim in the early 1980s, when they had free beer after the swim. The Bureau of Land Management doesn't seem to have such a joie de vivre attitude these days.


The swim is just a goldmine of money for the Davis Aquatic Masters, who sponsor the swim. Going to their webpage I saw that they were taking a team trip to the Galapagos Islands. That's nice. One of my teams once went to Fentons.


Men and women were each arranged into two waves: 18-39 and 40+. Kids were in six more waves: boys/girls of three age groups -- 10-Under, 11-14, and 15-18.


And then there were the Wetsuit Weenies. They get their own wave.


Because of the sheer volume of people, swimmers were asked to arrive an hour early, which my husband always hears as two hours. Dragging his poor family up at the crack of dawn (I only enjoy that when I get paid to coach my 6 a.m. workout at Laney College), we set off on a breakfast-churning, winding Napa road.


In the free time I had, I saw dozens of swim pals and even found myself sitting next to the dad of a girl I coached in high school in 1987. Yikes, I even recognized him. Everyone looked like they were enjoying themselves and seemed to know what they were doing. Except for the Wetsuit Weenies. They were changing into their blubber suits and then looking around for another neoprene addict to zip them up. Hey guys, where's the BatCave??

My husband was in the third wave starting the two-mile race (men and women, but not kids, also had those same categories for a one-mile race which followed). After the fourth wave the Wetsuit Weenies went off. The lake was about 70 degrees, 95 percent of all attendees were normal, non-Weenies (even the 9-year-olds), and there was no carbon bike to leap aboard after the swim. What gives?


They were either training for a triathlon or just true, world-class Weenies, who probably sit with a little crocheted blanket on their laps when watching movies set in autumn. Even worse, after they get out of the water, they then have to find someone to unzip them (help me please sir, I can't get dressed or swim on my own . . .) Then they walk around with the top half of their wetsuit folded down looking like they've begun molting, or somebody scratched them with a coin to reveal the prize underneath.


Another thing that really bugged me was the fact that a local youth swim team brought a group of swimmers out to this event and then the coach SWAM ALONG with the kids (not even the 10-Unders, for cryin' out loud!!) so that they would feel comfortable. Hey, it's OPEN WATER swimming, not Follow The Leader. If you want to feel comfortable PRACTICE. Duh.


Everyone has to learn what to do when they swim and, assuming it's not some sort of event which involve parachutes or crocodiles, you should learn to figure it out for yourself. That's what LIFE IS. Duh again.

My daughter did great, 4th in the 11-12 age group behind a pair of twins that are turning 13 in a few days and her superstar pal. My husband finished in the top half of his age group, undoubtedly failing to crack the top 10 due to his lack of sleep.

Would I Still Like You Outside of Our Lane?

Most of my students at Laney College get in the same lane each day. At other (official) Masters programs, the swimmers are assigned to lanes depending on their 100 freestyle interval. At mine it's always a frantic reshuffling based on who:

• stayed up too late doing homework/work/drinking
• has/is soon to have a sick child
• is/isn't breastfeeding (not everyone may qualify)
• depended on someone to pick them up, who turned out to be a flake
• doesn't like the set that day
• set their alarm for "p.m." instead of "a.m." (If only I had a dollar for every time I heard that one!!!)

They greet each other before getting in, chat after getting out, and generally commiserate after the hard swims. Some socialize outside of the pool, sharing other hobbies and activities (huh? you need others?) and an occasional birthday celebration. We haven't had any marriages yet (of people who met in my class), but I've seen two breakups.

The first one was horrible, with the female trying to keep up a brave front (I'm okay if I don't look at him) and the male oblivious (well we hate each other, but I'm going to swim now because it works into my schedule.) The other was a little easier to live with, because the female just came every day with a heavy heart, and the male disappeared.

Swimming in a lane is like living and working with these people for an hour each day. Each lane has a pecking order, where some people are dominant. (My personal lane is pictured at right, with pecking order shown increasing from left to right.) Some lanes turn into little Stockholm Syndrome sites, where the hostages grow to love their captors. While this may also apply to the Coach/Athlete relationship, I'll save that for another day. Some people are just terrible lanemates, but their people get in with them day after day, perhaps thinking that this is just all there is.

The worst lanemate is someone who plows down the middle of the lane, endangering all who swim in the opposite direction. Lapping the middle-of-the-roader is just about impossible. They just don't get it, maybe due to some spacial dysfunction (that's generous of me!) or because they are just magnetically attracted to the line on the bottom of the pool. Calling their attention to this fact only serves to frustrate me. I get that look back in return like I'm Charlie Brown's teacher talking to the class: wuah, wuah, wuah.

Another irritating lanemate is someone who crowds the interval, leaving too soon. Then they either catch the person ahead, who deserved to be ahead of them, or grow to think they are faster than they really are because their time sounds impressive. Usually this just happens in my noon class, so morning folks read on.

My 6 a.m.ers have three lane problems:

• (1) people who overestimate their speed and think that it won't be a problem if they do a different interval than the two other people in their same lane
• (2) people who have one tragically comical stroke in a set of IMs, and their bad stroke is not the same as any of their lanemates' worst strokes. This results in three different lead changes within the lane, all in the space of a 100 IM
• (3) people who don't like swimming with more than one other person in their lane, which is difficult on days when all the other lanes have four people and I have to pretend that I haven't noticed the still water in the south end of Lake Laney

And yet with all the dysfunction going on everyone keeps coming. There's no pool equivalent of road rage, nobody has gone po(ol)stal yet, and I like peeking into people's egos (psychiatrically speaking) and seeing who can take the pressure and who can't -- just in case we all get trapped in an elevator or something.

Fourteenth floor: millinary, fine jewelry, and lifelong fitness. All aboard!

IFLYBYU

This was a license plate one of my teammates used to have, back in the day when I was fast. Aaron flew by most people, especially moi, because I hadn't figured out how to swim butterfly easily, even when I could break 2:00 in the 200 freestyle. Now my butterfly is easier -- still not fast, but easy
-- and of course he can still fly by me. So what has really changed in the grand scheme of things: nothing.

Butterfly is so hard for so many people,

but not so much for this guy (right). You may see more of him in the upcoming months. His website is conveniently divided into English and Chinese. As for the rest of you . . .

Woody Allen wrote so many funny lines, but one of my favorites is "I am two with nature." That's what most swimmers' butterfly looks like.

When I first started coaching, I was co-coaching a Masters swim team with my pal Janice. There was a guy, Steve, on the team who always substituted freestyle when I said butterfly. First I guessed that he didn't hear the instructions, so I repeated it. Next I figured that he didn't know how to do the stroke, so I offered to give him a few tips. But he told me that he just didn't want to swim it. When I asked why, he told me the funniest thing: "I just don't like the look on people's faces when they finish." And it wasn't even like he didn't want to work hard. He worked on freestyle sets, and was even fairly competitive. Whatever. Our coach-athlete relationship became a little less coach-y after that.

This week we had a great workout that featured hard freestyle alternating with six 25s of butterfly. Just enough butterfly to tire you out before the freestyle began. Then, when you finally made it through the freestyle, it was time for butterfly again. I love the devious sets. Everyone had that same look on their face that Steve was missing. It was beautiful.

Everyone is so nice to me when they're done with that set or one like it, it's like they've just been rescued from a well. What a great phenomena to have people say "thank you" after you've just caused them pain. I love my job.

So here's my latest complaint: sixth-grade English. Why is it, when someone's advanced they are forced to peer tutor? Just because you know something doesn't mean you know anything about teaching. That's why people have to get TEACHING credentials, for cryin' out loud. My sixth-grade daughter doesn't need to learn how someone else learns and to work with their strengths. The other sixth-grader doesn't need to hear from the geeky kid in the seat next door, who can barely control her eye-rolling muscles.

In swimming (where the world is pure, and life is good), if my daughter is faster than the other kids, she gets her own interval. She doesn't have to stop and look underwater at the kid in the next lane. Hello, we have a coach! Why can't someone in education challenge my daughter? Is it because they're afraid of stigmatizing her? If they gave her double the number of dorky vocabulary words, maybe, but what if in addition to the See Jane reader the rest of the class was using, the teacher could assign her something, you know, complicated -- and email her or get together for 10 minutes before school.

Not everyone who is a fast swimmer is a good coach. Not everyone who is smart is a good teacher. Not everyone who swims fast or is smart in school even likes teaching. Lucky I was one of those people who was a good observer, interested in the sport itself, and a deep thinker (HA! Two out of three!) Teaching is just about all I do; I run the household like a workout, too. First you hang this up, then put this here, then pick up that. DON'T TALK WHEN I'M TALKING! Yes, I know algebra is hard. IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE HARD. And that's just with my husband.

Oh well, my daughter can be challenged in the pool. So can all of us. And that guy pictured above. Swimming's the best.