I asked myself this Saturday morning at my next attempt to swim 200 yards straight of butterfly: what the heck does this have to do with Truth, Justice, and the American Way? This is nuts. 

Near the end of my workout, I completed a 50, and then two more 25s, and then the lifeguard said it was time to get out. I was about to tell her about my mission, but then realized that if she complied, I’d have to swim four more laps, so I called it a day and rode my bike to get some coffee instead.

Unless you are a freak of nature with tweaked shoulders, butterfly is the most difficult and possibly the most stupid of swim strokes ever invented. If I should ever fall off a cruise ship and be forced to swim for survival, butterfly would be my last choice. Only if I felt I had no hope left, and would want to exhaust myself into unconsciousness, would I choose this stroke.

On the other hand, take my old college roommate Brigitte. Her shoulders were so flexible all those years ago, she could touch both of her elbows in front of her. This is probably still the case. This was very much fun to see at college parties, especially when we were dancing to ABBA, but it could also explain her almost freakish love of this stroke, and how she could swim it every day at practice, even swimming the 500 Fly meets, making it look smooth and effortless.

Butterfly is not effortless for me, and yet, apparently to the naked eye, and I do not say this to flatter myself because it is not true, apparently, when I swim butterfly, I make it look easy. This is what I’ve been told. Okay, um, has anyone seen pictures of me racing bikes? Take this one in my banner. I know you’re thinking that looks like a smile.

That is an intense grimmace of pain! Come on, people. It is the same pain in butterfly, even worse, because at least on a bike, you can coast and not fear falling over. If you stop your arms in butterfly, you stop moving and then you can drown. This is a scientific fact! It is a very dangerous stroke and should not be attempted by the meek. I only swim it when I am at my most depressed state, because it is so painful, so grueling, it tricks me into believing that the other aspects of my life are easy.

I’ve been swimming butterfly a lot lately. The other day, for example, I was equating it to Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and then I learned at last Friday’s sentencing that what turned my junior college swim coach down his path of pedophilia — the psychiatrist called it paraphilia, meaning objects or teenagers (please, help me)  – was that his first sexual partner criticized his “technique,” telling him that he didn’t know how to use his “butterfly muscles.”

I wanted to puke. Time to rethink thihs plan.

A friend there later assured me that, no, he was lying, he had to be, don’t read more into that, and I believe she is right. Still, even if he was lying about that, which is probable, it could be true. He was obsessed with butterfly, much more than any coach known to human kind. Let’s say, not even the team I swam with in Prague swam that much fly, and that was in Eastern Europe in the early 90s, when they were clinging to their top secret ways.

This particular summer, when I was 18, I’d guess, I had a fear of butterfly, this coach told me. This was evidenced in my first ever attempt at the 200  Fly, at an age group meet one summer between my freshman and sophomore year at my junior college. He was there, because he coached an age group team, too.

Everyone else on my age group team had the good sense to scratch out of the event, because it is so ridiculous, but me. I did not know any better. I was the only swimmer in my age group to swim it, meaning I was the only one swimming it in the whole Olympic sized pool. I am not saying this was why my performance was so poor. My performance was poor because I was weak and scrawny and had no business swimming the 200 fly.

My friends now back from lunch cheered for me at the other end of the pool. They were holding Burger King soda cups. A Pepsi or Coke would have tasted so good. I really should have scratched that event and gone to lunch with them.

“Uh, you looked, um, smooth?” my friend Ed said when it was over. He gave a little belch.

“Yeah. You sure make it look pretty,” my said Becca.  “French fry?”

My time actually the slowest time on record for anyone at the Pleasanton Seahawks and I wonder if that record still stands? I did not purposely seek this knowledge, but overheard it. In the team meeting room, there are a list of all the records, and in the weeks following this swim meet, I was posted at  #8 out of eight fools to have done that swim, maybe a minute slower than #7.  I overheard two of my girlfriends spotting it in the minutes before our weekly team meeting.

“That sucks,” one of them giggled.

“Oh my God. How does she live with herself?”

Well, I am paraphrasing, but it was something like that, something akin to, “If I swam that slow, I would probably jump off a bridge.”

Because really, is there anything worse than being the slowest swimmer in the whole wide world?

Oh! If only they knew that I had received my punishment, maybe they would have been more tolerant for my obvious flaw? I am slow at the 200 fly, as my junior college coach explained, in this fateful, special one-on-one Saturday workout that he scheduled just for me,  because I am afraid of it.

Yes, yes. I am, I was, afraid of butterfly. It is hard. It defies common sense. You are supposed to make two big circles with your arms, and lift them both out of the water at the same time. It is fine for a 50, tolerable for a 100, but 200 yards or meters of it is masochistic.

To help me conquer this fear, this coach felt it would be in my best interest to scream at me until I was reduced to tears, in full view of anybody who might stroll by. His voice bounced off the buildings surrounding the pool.

In the middle of his tirade, Mr. Brown, the PE instructor, ambled by.

“Tell Mr. Brown your time in the 200 Fly,” this coach said.

“Please. It was slow, okay?”

“Tell him your time.”

“3:52.”

Mr.  Brown stifled a laugh. “Well,” he said. “That’s a start, I guess.”

The star swimmer on our junior college team walked by.

“Tell her your time,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“3:52.”

She laughed, too.

If only I could remember exactly what else it was that he had said, maybe I could make sense out of it today, but the gist was that I was swam slow on purpose. Because no one could really be that slow. It would have to be by choice. I was stubborn. That was why. There is something very, very wrong with me to choose to be that slow.

So yes. Let’s scream at someone and tell her how worthless she is, and let’s do this ’til she’s a crying heap of flesh, clinging onto the wall, staring into the gutter. She’ll be begging to swim butterfuly the next time around. You’ll have to plead with her to stop! It’s actually chronicled in various sports journals that screaming, ridicule, and name calling are effective methods to bring out the best in people.

Years after my experience at this junior college, I did have some personal success in the 50 and the 100 fly at Cal  State University, Bakersfield. One time, the last time I ever swam it, I bettered my personal record by two seconds from just that afternoon, and that had been a PR, too. My coach ran to me after the event, saying, “Katie, I had no idea you were a butterflier.”

I didn’t know I was a butterflier. It was my last event in college, and I was swimming next to my roommate in the consolation finals, and I was mad at her for some reason and I had nothing to lose, so I swam every lap as hard as I could, squeazing out every ounce of strength I had. It came fron inside me, not anyone telling me what I was supposed to be. I felt like I was flying. The burning was so sweet. And then it was over.

But I never swam the 200 fly. Good God. No way.

In the days leading up to his sentencing of this pedophile – who, by the way, did not molest me, and what he did to me would not send anyone to jail but should have gotten him fired, but what he did to countless innocent girls got him forty years in prison – I had decided that eight laps of butterfly would symbolize Truth, Justice, and the American Way. I wrote about this the other day.

Humbled by these eight laps twice so far, I must officially declare that eight laps of butterfly straight is even more painful than I had remembered. Saturday morning I thought, Isn’t this a lot of effort to spend focusing on this man who has done so much to make people’s lives miserable? Am I going to have to think about him every time I do this?

There has to be a stronger, more powerful motivation.

Butterfly is fun. I like it. I think I might be good at it.

I’m blogging on my iPhone because yesterday or the day before I started getting all these terrible notifications that my computer was infected by a terrible virus and now two days later my computer, the one I’m supposed to use to get work done, so I can buy food and pay rent, more or less, logs off the moment I log on.

It’s terrible timing. It would be much better if it could inconvenience my life next week. Hopefully, I will tell you why that is, but it has to do with Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and it’s so maddening that a computer virus would stand in the way of that. But it won’t stop me. I just hope my car starts.

So I’m going to tell you about the annual Hour Swim that our Coach Marie makes us swim every year, and then I’m going to tell you about my goal to swim the 200 Fly, maybe at a swim meet.

Last Sunday, I swam 4340 yards in one hour, for the annual Hour Swim, a postal event that no one really wants to do, but Coach Marie loves it, and we love Marie, so we all do it. Nobody loves the hour swim.

My personal record is 4700 yards, so 4340 is much slower, but is about the same as the last time I swam this five years ago, with a still broken collarbone, but I didn’t know that at the time and thought the pain was just pain.

By the way, doctors should never tell their patients, especially athletes, that it’s “just pain.”

So this year’s pace was considerably slower, but that was also “the plan.” Sometimes I have to remind myself that’s the plan, because it can feel discouraging to be that far off pace, or at least at the same pace you held with a busted shoulder.

This year, my “plan” was to stay under threshold (whatever that is; I went by feel) this winter for “base yards.” I told a lane mate this and she looked at me like I was crazy. And judging by the results, I could be, because the guys that hammer day in and day out swam really fast, and here I was, slower than ever.

The reason why I want to try it this way is because the year I swam 4700, I swam at or around that pain threshold day in and day out, but then I couldn’t go any faster later that season. I know I talked about swimming a PR that year in a prior post, but that was in the 50 Fly, an event I didn’t even train for.

I became efficient at swimming hard non-stop. That came with some benefits, but I couldn’t sprint freestyle to save my life.

Giving me some hope was today’s main set. It was 3 X (3 X 100), descending one through three, with the first one at your hour swim pace (or threshold) and the last one at your mile pace. I allowed myself 15 seconds rest, ‘cuz that’s what Marie wrote on the board, and I trust her.

I remember in years past struggling this time of year because my hour swim pace was about as fast as I could go. This time, since I stayed below redline all winter, it wasn’t so hard going 1:21, 1:18, and 1:15 three times through. I didn’t wear out my overdrive. Maybe?

I’m still not certain if this is the best way to go because it feels wimpy and counter-intuitive to swim slow to swim fast. Even though our swim coach at CSUB was keen on base yards, twenty years ago, it’s not like any of us really purposely swam slow. We were always racing each other, pretending that we weren’t.

It’s a lot more common in cycling, though. There’s a lot of science that proves that this works, and there are always cynics who claim it’s just a way to get out of working hard. Time will tell.

Aside from maybe a triathlon, I’m not sure what my swim goals even are, either. I’d like to do some open water swims, and maybe even some sprint Fly events, and maybe even the 200 Fly, though that one is connected to Truth, Justice, and the American Way, which I’m sure to tell you about sooner or later.

I did swim 250 yards of fly today, not all at once. One of the joys of being a Born Again Beginner is you get to let yourself take breaks and be forgiving of yourself. You can go a lot farther that way.

I haven’t been happier in the water since I started swimming regularly last October, I think that was, after a four-year break to go pretend to race bikes. This is where I should be.

I’m back at  Tamalpais Aquatics Masters, a team I started swimming with in the mid-90s, when I first moved to San Rafael to live with my Grandma Cathy. Many of the same people I started swimming with are still there, and I’m still one of the youngest people there. I don’t know what that means.

Back when I was 25 years old, and still dreaming of personal bests, I swam with the early and serious morning group at 6:30, because I thought it’d make me faster. Well, in two years, I swam my slowest times ever. I added nine seconds to my best 100 breast time, for example.  Nobody ever does that. I couldn’t figure out why, because our intervals were so hard, like, impossibly hard, for most of the entire work out.

Of course, we probably only swam half of our workout time, because between sets, we’d have to let the lane leaders talk. They had important things to say. There was also a period where we’d have to pause for a few minutes to let our lane leader of leaders, who had once been a rival of Mark Spitz, sprint a series of 25 yards wearing a monofin (this monstrous one-finned fin, like that of a whale), while we’d look on in awe.

I do believe this may have impacted my over all fitness, all that sitting around in awe, and then spinning my arms trying to make send offs that hardly anyone could make.

Thanks to flex hours at work, I was able to switch to the 7:45 workout time, and regain a sense of sanity. That’s been my regular spot since. My thought then was this: making 100s on the 1:15 makes sense sometimes (like when you can actually do it), but not all the time. Why not slow down the pace a bit, but keep moving for the whole workout?

Well, that was my thought. I don’t know how I improved relative to the hammerheads, but I did start to see gains again, mainly in open water events and even the 50 fly of all things.

I want to understand why masters swimmers swim like that, despite all the information out there that proves that there’s a time and place for suffering, and that you don’t have to suffer all the time.

Just today, when I got into warm up, the guys were wrapping up a set of 50s. On the white board, Coach Marie’s communication medium of choice, it said 8 to 12  x 50 (that’s 50 yards), choice non-free (that means any stroke but freestyle), build up, with 20 seconds rest.

If you really build up these 50s, by starting at a moderate pace and increasing the effort to a sprint, that set can be painful. But these guys were swimming freestyle, on the 40 second interval, and it was touch and go the whole time.

There’s nothing wrong with swimming a set like that, but when you have to make a tough send off for a prolonged period of time, you have to back down the intensity, or you won’t make the whole set. You have to pace yourself. There is nothing wrong with pacing yourself. But when it’s speed set, which this was, if you gave yourself more time to recover, you could actually work on that, um, speed, and keep your stroke together. You can actually swim faster.

So why. Why do they do that? Is it some badge of honor to swim intervals you can barely make? What is the purpose?

I did the 50s on the minute, and I swam free down, and butterfly back, because two laps of fly would not be pretty. That was hard enough.

That’s why I swim by myself.

I need to print this out and just hand it out to my teammates the next time they ask me why I don’t swim with the group. “Don’t you want to swim faster?” they ask.

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, yes I do!

I’ve used Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, and LingQ in the past, but Assimil is the best for learning a language from scratch. I’ve been learning French (French with Ease) for the past week, and though I have fifteen weeks to go still, I am so far amazed by the results.

I just went into Starbucks for a hot chocolate and an asiago bagel, with cream cheese. Please don’t criticize me for going to Starbucks. This was a last minute decision made after sitting in the sauna at my gym for thirty minutes, which included twenty minutes extra for the one shower with hot water, because the woman using it did not recognize that while she was wasting our very valuable resource, I was slowly dehydrating, losing precious minerals in the process into an evaporating puddle on the sauna floor, and I simply had no other recourse than to go to Starbucks and refuel, lest I pass out on 4th Street with no one to save me.

Well, while I was waiting in line for Starbucks, there was a woman behind me speaking French into her cell phone. And I have to say, it was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard, especially now that I understand nearly 80% of it. And this is after only one week!

Here is what she was saying:

What do you mean you have to work late tonight? You son of a bitch, you’re always working late! It’s because of her, isn’t it? That dragon lady, Genevieve? Don’t lie to me! There is something going on, I know it! Did you say you wanted one shot or two? 

What is amazing about this program is that so far, my vocabulary list has been the following:

le frommage — cheese
la fontaine — fountain
un briquet rouge — a red lighter
deux bières blondes — two light beers
and
Où est le mètro San-Michel ? — Where is the San-Michel metro?

So I had to do a lot of filling in the blanks, especially considering her conversation did not contain a single vocabulary word, but I know that that is more or less what she said.

The last time I got a foot massage at that reflexology place across the street, I thought they were going to rip my feet apart.

After a year’s recovery, it’s even worse.

“Relax!” said my foot masseuse, yanking on my toes. His Engish had much improved over last year’s visit when he spoke with exaggerated arm movements, which I thought very well made the point, but even then, sharing common words would aid in our communication and create a more pleasurable experience. This is what I thought.

Going to this place, for a “date” with Chuck was all my idea. I thought it’d be romantic. Let’s get foot massages and then fill our bellies with Indian food from the  Bombay Garden next door. I very much liked this idea.

I knew there were risks with the foot massage. Most of the time, I hate them, because for some reason, they bring me terrible pain. Theoretically, my feet should be much stronger now, I reasoned, what with all this running in Vibram Five Fingers, those shoes made famous in Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run. I should be able to take any amount of abuse now.

If you haven’t read Born to Run yet, and if you like running and especially a good story, you should read it. It will knock your shoes off. It will make you think.

Since having switched VFFs, which are really nothing more than flimsy five-toed socks with thin rubber soles to emulate barefoot running, I have noticed that I no longer have the knee pain that had so bothered me in my many attempts to run in the past.

My feet hurt much too soon before I could ever log in enough miles to get knee pain.

The other side to this is that as my feet get stronger, the pain and soreness is subsiding, which is exactly what “the experts” say will happen. It takes months for your muscles and tendons to gain the strength that should have been developed in your feet since childhood, they say. All these years of wearing shoes have made our feet weak and flimsy, the root of most running injuries. Give it time. Be patient. Don’t overdo it.

So, little by little, I’ve been buidling up. I ran 3.5 miles on the track last  Tuesday, for example.

So of course, a foot massage would be my reward.

I only gasped a couple of times, and thought the burning sensation in my toes must surely be attributed to the increased blood flow in the metatarsal region. I did my best to relax and breathe into it.

I looked over at Chuck, who was sound asleep in his reclined massage chair, covered in blankets, while his masseuse, we’ll call her Martha, gently ran her fingers down his calves and feet.

His massage looked different than mine. I’ve got to get Martha next time. I’ve just got to.

“Oh my God, this is the best massage I’ve ever had in my life!” Chuck said, in a brief moment of consciousness, before drifting back into his golden slumber

“Relax your feet! What is wrong with you!” said my masseuse. We’ll call him Satan.

“Breathe into it, you little honkey wimp!”

I withheld a tear, and wondered to myself: could it be possible that my feet already are relaxed, and what might appear to be stiffness to the untrained eye and hands might actually be tendons and ligaments that you are ripping apart?

Today’s run on the trails of China Camp was soothing. I felt in communion with nature in my VFF’s, with just the sounds of the birds chirping and my labored breathing and wind through the trees as a background, and occasional brake squeals from mountain bikes.

“Nice, why don’t you just stop right in the direction I’m going, ding dong,” said one mountain biker, headed straight at me for no reason because he had the whole path now, thanks to my efforts to share the trails with a buffoon.

“Why don’t you shut up?” I said.

“Whatever, blah blah blah, blah blah blah,” he said.

“Hey! I’m having a conversation here with nature. Stop interrupting and watch where you’re going.”

“Wah wah wah wah, I own the road, my bike is very expensive, and it has 27 gears, ha!”

“Oh yeah? I’m a cyclist, too, and I have even more gears, so get off your high horse!”

I turned left from the dirt to the pavement, and felt a sharp pain at the base of my toes. I wondered how I would make it back to Chuck’s car, but hobbled along the road.

Hours later, my foot is blue right in front of the second toe.

I am never getting a foot massage again, and I’ve got to come up with better comebacks.

After Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, her autobiographical novel chronicling her first mental breakdown — the liner notes said it was funny! — I thought I’d move to something more lighthearted, an author I know little about, Charles Bukowski. I’m reading the Post Office, another autobiographical piece, chronicling the rise and fall of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter ego, in the U.S. postal system.

Bukowski is much more funny than Sylvia Plath.

He’s a jerk. In between books, sitting on a couch with my iPhone, I of course had to read all about them both. I know much more about Plath  than Bukowski, but what I learned about Bukowski is that, unlike Plath, who died much too young, at her own doing, he developed a coping mechanism for his depression, and that was booze. You might call him a survivor. So I was thinking it’s too bad Plath never took up any vices.

So when I got home  — Oh wait. Stop. I spent the last week in L.A. We had just gone down to Tempe for Chuck’s Ironman triathlon, and then on our way home last Monday, stopped for a rest that would last several days, in Banning, California, population 27,000, just outside of Beaumont, and twenty miles from Palm Springs. It wasn’t just to hang out withg with Officer Babcock for an hour on the sidewalk in front of the AMPM, sniffing in the odors of Chuck’s SUV’s blown transmission fluid, which took our minds off the Ironman and onto other things, such as just what are we going to do down here in Southern California, now that we can’t leave ’til the transmission is replaced, which is never going to happen today or tomorrow or the next day, because it’s Thanksgiving. Like, what do people do here besides drive around, quickly. You never see them outside, unless they are walking to their cars.

We drove his rent-a-car, a PT Cruiser, maroon, to the Montebello mall. His son David, who housed us a couple of nights,  recommended it. He said we could get go see real life pregnant teenagers. He did not disappoint!

There was no book store in this mall, just a Hallmark card store, a newspaper stand that sold junk food, pregnant teenagers, and clothing and shoe stores with flashing lights in the ceilings.

My iPhone pointed us to Barnes and Noble’s, so we drove the five miles and twenty traffic lights across town, and there I chose three books, all by their covers, because I’ve never been let down in this way: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; Bukowski’s Post Office; and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the best cover of them all.

So, when I got home — I thought I never might; Chuck’s driving back to Banning, seven hours away, right this very second – back on a regular computer, I of course had to go reading about Bukowski.

Here is Linda Lee Bukowski, reminiscing about her true love for him, plus Bukowski himself. He’s a riot!

I can’t wait to read all about Brontë and Wuthering Heights.

We were riding around Paradise this morning (Paradise Drive in Tiburon), my last ride in my 30s, and my friend, relaying her entertaining moments in the sport of triathlon, said, without pausing to edit, “And then I had a ‘Katie Kelly’ moment.”

Whoa whoa, stop, wait. What the heck is a “Katie Kelly” moment?

What unfolded was a triathlete’s nightmare, and by that, I suppose she meant the type of thing that could only happen to me. But it happened to her. A Katie Kelly moment.

Only seconds before the start of the swim, the strap on her goggles snapped. Her friend and fellow competitor said she could borrow hers, but they were in the transition area. And so, panicked, my friend sprinted back to the transition area, crawled up a dirt hill, in her bare feet no less, dug through her friend’s belongings in the transition area ’til she found the goggles, and scrambled back to the start, missing it by minutes. She said she was the last one in the water, and even more last when she got out.

She said that she swam so slowly, breaststroke no less, that at least she wasn’t fatigued, she said.

She said that she was so late entering the transition area that only one volunteer remained.

We laughed at her foibles, with her, not at her, of course, until I jolted myself back to the underlying message: 

That was the “Katie Kelly” moment.

Tomorrow I’m turning 40 years old, and all I have to show for it are Katie Kelly Moments.

When I was a teenager, without talking too much about it, my mom handed me a short Sports Illustrated article she thought I’d like. It was about a swimmer who in her late thirties finally made it to the Olympic Trials. I don’t remember who it was, but I remember the last line of the article, which quoted the athlete. She said, “I guess I’m just a late bloomer.”

My mom was never a Swim Meet Mom. She had her own stuff to do (like race cars). She wasn’t one of those moms who went to all the meets and rooted for me on the sidelines, but she liked hearing about them. She never blinked when I told her that I had, again, finished last. She pointed out how much smaller I was compared to others my own age, that I was a late bloomer. She said my time would come.

Reflecting now on those conversations, I am recalling with relief that she never said there was a time limit on being a late bloomer.

And so, on the eve of my 40th birthday, I clink my glass to all the other late bloomers in the world, at any age. Let’s see what kind of (Insert Your Name Here) Moment we can experience next.