5-hour swim meets too long, driving me crazy

(802 words)

Concerned friends are asking me how I’m coping. They want to know if what I predicted would be one of the worst things that ever happened to me is as bad as I pessimistically thought it would be.

I tell them I was mistaken.

It’s worse.

Our oldest daughter joined the swim club.

I’m never near the water, but I feel like I’m the one that’s drowning.

Saturday the team is scheduled to have a meet that starts at 9 a.m. and is expected to grind on until almost 2 p.m.

And this is one of the more convenient ones.

Most of them have been from 4 to about 9 p.m. on Saturday, times when I’m conditioned by cheerful habit to be to be in my jammies in front of the fire engrossed in college football and Kentucky bourbon.

Instead, I’m up at the swim meet. In street clothes. Sober.

See why I’m riled?

It takes a brave father these days to admit he detests having to attend one of his daughter’s school events. That makes me eligible for service medals.

I’m thinking The Purple Heart.

Or maybe The Black ‘n’ Blue Butt. Those cramped bench seats are a real pain in the ass.

Let me make this clear: I adore my daughter and will happily stare at her for days on end just to savor every observable detail of a life that is flying by faster than Michael Phelps in the 200 meter butterfly.

That’s why I enjoy taking her to practice three or four nights a week from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. and would never dream of complaining (even though that time cruelly conflicts with the heart of the Happy Hour where I know all the boys are crestfallen whenever I’m not there).

When she’s practicing I can take a book and spread out in the uncrowded stands. I glance at the book, but most of the time I’m watching my first born swim. It’s magical.

I love that she’s part of a team. I love watching her encourage her teammates and learn a discipline that could help keep her fit and competitive her whole life.

And I love that I can do all that in 60 jiffy minutes, and that she’s involved the entire time.

That’s about what it was like when my old man took me to play youth hockey. Games lasted about an hour and I was on the ice about half the time.

And, damn, I was good.

It’s not at all that way with the marathon meets.

These team meets can last nearly five hours, involve as many as 75 six-lane individual heats and a cast of thousands.

My daughter is in three of them. Three!

And she’s in the water for maybe four minutes.

That means I have a vested interest in her swimming more slowly so I’d get to see her more. But that’s not the way swim meets work. I need to encourage her to go faster! Faster! Faster!

So the more she improves, the less I’ll get to see her swim.

But the event leaves me plenty of time to observe other parents and I can only include that some of them have been sniffing chlorinated water for so long that it’s damaged their ability to think logically.

Some of them think this all makes sense. In fact, some of them think screaming at 13-year-olds to swim faster is reasonable.

It might be, too, if any of the kids were capable of swimming with their ears above the water line.

And while I adore my children, I confess I’m mostly indifferent to everyone else’s.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to see any of them sink to the bottom of the pool when they jump in the water, but observing them splash around in the pool just isn’t one of my priorities on Saturday evenings.

I’m not offended if you feel the same way about the success of my darling daughters, as idiotic as that concept may be.

Yes, it takes a village, but the chief gets to prioritize who gets served first in our own teepees.

Worst of all, this conceivably could be part of my life for the next six years, 15 if her 7-year-old sister follows in her fin steps.

I’m not sure I can take it.

Happily, on Saturday I won’t have to. I’ve been invited to a Barnes & Noble-sponsored book signing at the Carnegie Free Library in Connellsville from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

It’s the book that contains large passages that have caused many readers to surmise I’m a wise and loving father.

If they only knew.

They’d think I’m all wet.

I guess when you’re a pool parent that sort of comes with the territory.

Related . . .

You’re the greatest swimmer ever! Now what?

A naked solution to swimsuit controversy

Now ear this!

A naked solution to swimsuit controversy

Unless I’m misreading the situation, and I don’t think I am, the future of competitive swimming could involve full nudity. And that gives me a kind of water willies that might be at odds with what just went through your mind.

I’m fascinated by the Michael Phelps swimming controversy involving the buoyancy-enhancing, friction reducing polyurethane swimsuit worn by dastardly German swimmer Paul Biedermann.

Golf, tennis and NASCAR, certainly, have struggled with souped up equipment issues for years. But it never dawned on me that swim apparel could be considered performance enhancing. Sure, a stylish one could maybe help you connect on the beach but after doffing the duds it would require standard pharmaceuticals to do any actual enhancing.

How wrong I was. I guess we can all rest assured that technological savants are at work to shave .0001 off a competitive swimmer’s time rather than devoting their genius to building, say, vehicles that are safer, more fuel efficient or -- and wouldn’t this be cool? -- edible.

Swimmer Beidermann tried to deflect the controversy by saying, “I hope there will be a time again when I can beat Michael Phelps without the suit.”

It sounds to me like he’s suggesting racing in the nude.

That would solve many problems while simultaneously launching a host of others.

I enjoy pure competition as much as the next guy, but if swimmers begin hunching over the starting blocks without even their Speedos on, I’m frantically clicking to find a channel with fully clothed bowlers.

Devoted students of this blog -- and thanks so much to all three of you! -- know I’m a near unwavering advocate of more nudity to improve nearly every social situation. Just last week, it was I that suggested nudity could save the space program from being forever marooned on Planet Boredom.

But naked competitive swimming is where I draw the line.

I understand that’s a confounding position because we can all agree that being naked in water is generally among the most joyful human experiences. It’s one reason people sing in the shower.

It feels good. You’re all sudsy. It’s cleansing. What could be better?

Veteran skinny dippers like me know the answer to that. It was back in high school when my friends and I would coax a group of innocent lovelies to sneak into neighborhood pools with us in the hopes it would lead to mutual corruption.

It never happened the way we dreamed but I enjoyed more illicit nudity on those moonlit summer nights than all those years later when the cable company mistakenly included The Playboy Channel in our basic package.

Those were my wonder years and from them blossomed a lifelong affinity with naked, or “nekkid” swimming.

The late, great Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard once said that the difference between being naked and being nekkid is the state of being without clothes and being without clothes and being up to something.

The logical conclusion of what swimmer Beidermann is proposing is naked, not “nekkid” swimming and that leaves me cold.

Despite our black president, our states embracing gay marriage and whiffs of pot legalization in California, we’re still essentially a puritanical nation that instinctively puts fig leaves on works of art rather than embracing our Eden’s essence.

Naked swimming would never fly.

Still, something must be done to mitigate the vexing swimsuit controversy.

I propose we remove the human element from the pool and simply drop the new high-tech suits into the water when the starting gun sounds.

Then we can cheer the empty super-charged suits as they fly down the lanes shucked free of their human cobs.

“USA! USA!”

It’ll seem a lot less impersonal when Ol’ Glory goes flying down the lane without an actual swimmer inside.

Purity police muddy Phelps's waters

I want to assure readers of this blog, which now includes at least two guys named Ronald, that I have no plans to drug test them. This blog will unconditionally continue to welcome both the sober and the so totally baked that they’re still giggling over the above picture of The Dude.

I’m doing this, in part, because I’m hoping to lure swimming legend Michael Phelps to jump on in. The water here’s fine.

Had Phelps, 23, been a reader earlier this summer, he wouldn’t be feeling compelled to bow and scrape before the nation’s purity police after a party goer snapped a picture of him snorkeling a bong and then sold the photo to dastardly editors at a British tabloid.

Who knew some pot smokers could be so lacking in scruples?

To me the absence of numerous other pictures indicates he took a single hit merely to be sociable. I see nothing wrong with that.

Of course, I’m on record as believing that those of us who work in places that don’t drug test have a social responsibility to test drugs on behalf of those who cannot, so judge for yourself.

Now USA Swimming has suspended him for three months and Kellogg’s is dropping its sponsorship. Both are ridiculous overreactions to a minor infringement that can almost be considered quaint in light of some of our other coke-sniffin’, spouse-abusin’, rootin’ tootin’, homey shootin’ felons who still earn millions playing professional sports for teams like the Dallas Cowboys.

It’s impossible for me to fathom the dedication it took for Phelps to get to the level he reached in Beijing. He trained every single day for five straight years. The result was an Olympic performance none of us will ever forget.

And suspending him from countless hours of grinding swimming makes no sense. If anything his sponsors should threaten to drop him if he doesn’t automatically resume spending countless hours of grinding swimming.

Heck, if America were at all serious about winning the so-called war on drugs, it would sentence anyone caught selling or using the stuff to work out with Phelps.

Now with the suspension, he’ll miss a March event and will be behind schedule for the July world championships in Rome. If he is to compete, it will be a grueling uphill swim, not unlike what a salmon must go through to spawn.

Of course, the salmon has a carnal motivation for all that work. Phelps does not.

That’s why six months ago I laid out a clear and wise path for Phelps to follow. I said he needed to sink his remaining swimming ambitions and become Arthur Bach.

Arthur was the Dudley Moore character in the title role of the 1981 movie of the same name. He played a happy, wealthy drunk who left $1,000 tips, was kind to and revered by his staff of flunkies and drivers, and generally laughed through life as though he were being tickled by a giant invisible feather.

As I correctly foresaw, further competitive swimming and trying to live up to his image would only dim Phelps’s luster.

I still maintain the thing for him to do is take the $10 million in sponsorships he’s already reaped and use it to build a huge mansion near the Inner Harbor at his Baltimore hometown, a great place to party. The house should feature an enormous and lavish pool with waterslides, a lazy river and an open invitation to all the inner city and neighborhood kids to stop by anytime they’d want. An adults-only section could feature the world’s largest swim-up Hooters.

He’d be the king of Baltimore (happily dethroning weirdo filmmaker John Waters). He’d be revered for his good nature. We’d all feel a little better about ourselves every time he’d make the news for some charitable act. And he could enjoy it all with the kind of endless buzz that made Arthur such a wonderful character.

It’s too bad he didn’t hear about my idea before he decided to try and live up to all the unrealistic expectations. Because now he’s trapped.

He’s forever at the mercy of those uptight stick-in-the-muds and their narrow 1950s definitions of how our heroes should behave.

I wish we could take the whole bunch and retroactively drug test them to see if they’ve ever taken a social hit on a bong or ever dabbled in recreational drugs.

I’ll bet we’d find they need to take lots more.