The Day I Swam Like Michael Phelps

For Jenn, with whom I’ve often laughed till I peed a little and who loves this story.

Photo by Marcelo Uva on Unsplash.

“Bikes are good to go. We better hit the road, lady cakes. We’re pushing it.”

“On it,” my sis said, detaching from ample breast her milk-drunk five-month-old, handing babe to husband, and grabbing her running shoes.

“The sky looks,” one of us said, brows umbrellaed, as my truck cruised south on I-5 toward billowing pewter, “not ideal.”

“Maybe it’ll be better on the other side of Salt Lake?” the other of us suggested.

I’d taken up sprint triathlons to support my post-cigarette addiction life and was looking for the next one (race, not smoke). When I discovered a tri in a town not far from our hometown in just a couple weeks—when my sister and I would both be there—we figured we couldn’t not, right? New baby, schmoo baby. (Yes, my sis is a badass.) To prep, we’d gone to the high school swim pool (where I’d swum years back for the school team) to time ourselves, and I’d given my two bikes a once-over and loaded them onto the bike rack of the truck I was sleeping in at the time. We were ready.

You don’t typically need to send in a swim time pre-race. But usually the swim portion of the swim-bike-run event is held in an outdoor body of water—a lake, a reservoir, an ocean. This one would be in an indoor pool. I wasn’t quite sure what to picture. But I understood our times were to ensure we swum alongside swimmers who were at relatively the same level, so as to avoid chaos, especially during flip turns (which, it seemed, there would be many of.)

At my old sloshing grounds, I dove in and slid, weightless, through aqua. On surfacing, I shot my arms back, enjoying the tension as I pushed through water’s weight to propel myself forward, the way my muscles remembered this space. I peered through goggles at the dark blue cross at the end of the lane and rolled into a forward somersault, flipping onto my belly, and pushing off the wall from a squat to execute my first flip turn in years flawlessly.

The pool was empty but for the two of us, and our voices echoed in the wet air that turned the late afternoon sun streaming through the glass patio door a muted chartreuse. We timed ourselves a couple of times to be sure and threw in a few extra laps of practice for good measure. I convinced her we should average our times and submit them as a second apart. They weren’t that far apart. And that way, we’d at least start the race side by side.

Now, as we drove south, the skies took on a charcoal hue. The swim was indoors. The other two legs were not. Still, high on anticipation and the joy of being together, we filled the truck’s cab with the bright rays of our laughter. And we weren’t surprised when we found a parking space not far from the pool without looking too hard or that, if you squinted, you could just make out a hint of the sun beyond a layer of clouds, as if preparing to feather apart before our opening act.

We unstrapped the bikes, trotted (more or less directly) to the spot where we were to pick up our race packets. With no line and ours among the very few packets not yet retrieved, it was a breeze. Up next, figuring out where to leave the bikes per the race numbers we were handed, 6 and 7. Easy-peasy once more—the slots not yet filled with steeds awaiting riders. My hybrid tires were too fat for the inserts intended for the sleek wheels of road bikes. No worries. I put the bike up on its kickstand at the end of the row designated and set my helmet atop a neat pile of my shorts, shirt, and shoes.

“You good?” I asked.

My sister grinned, and we made a mad dash for the pool.

The gun that would start the race was a handful of minutes from being fired when all emerged—we from the locker room and they, into our vision, through a chlorine-drenched, muggy haze. A sea of black triathlon suits stretched in a line so well ordered you couldn’t help but envision toppling the first like a domino. The line extended along the short top of the pool’s rectangle and then down one of its long sides, where, at the end, it made a two-person about-turn to extend halfway back up the pool, before devolving into a cluttered circle, only for lack of room. Our fellow competitors, even those waiting to join the cue once the front runners were in the pool, tossed shiny, capped heads in the chlorinated mist. They jumped in place, flexed polyestered calves, took in long breaths through their noses. They focused intently on the pool separated into (decidedly thin) lanes by those dividers that look like giant floating Smartie necklaces. Little light shone from a high corner window.

Not the actual start of our triathlon but similar. Photo by mibro on Pixabay.

My sister’s gaze, wide, met mine. I shrugged. I’d told her triathlon suits seemed unnecessary since we’d be in a pool and had not worn mine in solidarity. We’d considered a shopping trip for Speedos or some such. But time gets away from you. I scanned the room for someone we were to check in with, feeling relaxed now we were here with minutes to spare. Spotting a woman seated at a small Charlie Brown-style booth, we approached.

“Hurry.” The woman gestured to the starting line.

I nodded. “We just need to know where—”

“Your numbers,” she said, pointing again to the front of the long row of racers.

“Huh?” I asked, still not understanding. “We have our numbers.” I held out the papers we were to give her. The 6 and 7 (corresponding to the RFID transponder chips clipped to our shoes and the bibs pinned to our running shirts) couldn’t be in fuller display.

“We’re lined up in order of numbers,” someone from the line said.

Ohhhh. We glanced at the 6 and 7, and our bulging eyes met each other’s.

“Hurry,” the woman urged again, taking our numbers and metaphorically shoving us forward with a a wave of her arm.

Clad in the only swimwear I had with me—my sea-foam green / sparkly gold starred bikini, with three matching plastic stars, one at each hip and the third between my breasts—I held my head high and walked steadily past the row of black-clad dominos. I pulled my long locks into a tight bun as I went. My sister, in her also not racing swimsuit, followed. I tried not to notice the hush of what little din of conversation there had been as we strolled past our would-be competition—to the front of the starting line. No racers 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 to be found.

I can’t believe I found the actual bikini in question on Poshmark. Thanks, mandisather.

“Um, what was your time?” I asked the man trying not to umbrella his brows behind us.

“What was yours?” he countered.

I gave my time sheepishly.

“That’s faster than Michael Phelps,” he quipped.

“Well, we’re fast,” I muttered, haughty. We weren’t. I saw the burning of my face mirrored in my sister’s cheeks. Who the hell were numbers 1 through 5 then? I wanted to know. I didn’t ask. They hadn’t shown up after all. (It wouldn’t be till the moment of this writing that I realize they probably had shown up—early enough to realize and correct their mistake.)

The dawning realization of how our mistake had happened came rapidly, if with little clarity, thanks to the help of number 8. The long of it this: In competitive swimming, more than one size pool exists. And here size matters a great deal. Olympic pools are twice (or twice plus 170 inches) the size of regulated high school and college pools. But no. That wasn’t the mistake. The regulation size for schools is complicated by the United States’ refusal to use the metric system, meaning competitive swimmers have two times for each record. So, for, say, the 50 freestyle, they have a top time in yards and another (slower one) in meters. In short, the pool of my alma mater was a 25-yard pool, whereas we were to have done our timed swims in a 25-meter pool. (A yard is 36 inches, a meter 39.4. Each lap—a length and back—was 50 meters, and we’d be doing 16 laps. You get the picture.)

At the moment, all we knew was that we’d measured in either yards or meters, and we should have done the opposite.

“What she would do?” either my sister or I asked.

“We have to do something,” the other one of us said as we pushed wayward strands of hair into each other’s caps.

“Too late.” The man behind us, his attempt to hide his schadenfreude winning no Oscar, nodded toward the starter climbing up a diving platform, gun in hand. The handful of goggled faces behind him were less glee, more grimace, their owners calculating the seconds that would be shaved off their final times due to this mess. I can’t recall how far back the first woman stood, but she wasn’t going to be in the first or the third of the staggered start groups. I snapped my goggles in place.

“Feel free to swim over top of me,” I called back unnecessarily as the gun went off. I sprang forth down the lane, which was smaller by half than normal. In order to get in the 32 lengths needed to do the (not quite) half mile first leg of the tri called for, we were to do a lap within each lane—swimming the first length down the right side and the second back up the left side before flip-turning, or ducking, under the lane divider to start down the right side of the next. I pulled my arms through the water with all my might, attempting to duck dive toward the bottom whenever a hand or spandex-covered arm graced my toe or calf, to time my breaths accordingly.

I lost count of bodies that made their way awkwardly past or above me long before I’d finished with the first lane, where I attempted my first and final flip turn of the day.

***

By the time we emerged gasping into the open air to dash toward our waiting bikes, the skies had opened up in a deluge the likes of which I’ve rarely seen. I was terrified braking near the bottom of a long hill toward a right turn into what seemed a rushing storm drain. I lost sight of my sister and learned only after the race she was slowed by the bike I loaned her—plagued by a faulty chain throughout leg two. (I’m realizing I could have been a better race partner.) A woman running alongside me shortly into leg three looked at my with wild eyes, rain streaming down her face. “I took my helmet off, right?” I squinted, unfazed by the question and equally disoriented, before assuring her she had. My foot was a block, numb from cold and wet by race’s end. My sister and I soon found each other, beaming with glee and throwing our arms around each other in agreement as the sun parted the clouds at last. It had all been magnificent!

Me and my sis, bathed in rain and post-race endorphins. Spanish Fork, Utah, US, Fall 2008.

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Ride/Write-Along Prompt

It’s the third Thursday—Ride/Write-Along week. Today, a simple prompt: Tell a story that makes you laugh. Or an alternative: What’s an unlikely talisman (á la the sea-foam and gold bikini) you’ve had in your life? I’d LOVE to hear the story or a line or two or just how the writing went in the comments. Last week, I wrote about laughing till I peed a little. Gold stars for anyone who makes me do it again.