Life After Grad School

Masters swimmers are a different species from normal human beings. We happily get older because every five years that means we age up one age group and have an advantage over the competition. We actually enjoy staring at the black stripe on the bottom of the pool for hours and getting yelled at by our coach. And some of us can’t think of anything more pleasant to do than get up at the crack of dawn for a swim workout.

At this year’s New England Masters Championship meet - incidentally the second largest masters meet in the country after Nationals - I had plenty of opportunity to observe some of the different subspecies of Masters swimmers. Here just a selected few:

• The sandbagger, who enters ridiculously slow times, then beats everyone else in the heat by several body lengths. Most of us have done this involuntarily. Some of us do it on purpose.
• The 90-year old, who has outlived his competition and keeps showing up and breaking records. We all want to be like him when we grow up.
• The recent Olympian, who doesn’t train, just competes for the heck of it and puts on a spectacular show smoking his (already very fast) competitors. We all wish we were like him.
• The middle-aged swimmer, who started swimming a few years ago, swims every event and then some and keeps getting faster every year. We applaud and wonder what we would have to do to get faster every year.
• The pregnant one, who surprised us with her slower than usual entry time, then shows up with a huge belly and still beats us. We are in awe.
• The former college star, who beats most swimmers, but laments the fact that her times are much slower than in college. We tell her to get over it.
• The family man who shows up with a happy and vocal cheering squad, often cute 3-year olds screaming “Go, Daddy!!”. We pretend they’re cheering for us.

Our team did great this year. Surprising the competition with our strong presence we got 3rd place of the medium-sized teams. We had a large number of outstanding swims, great team spirit, lots of support and a ton of fun. To be repeated soon …

Living in New England it’s hard to get people to stop long enough to think about water conservation and water quality as a critical issues. There seems to be plenty of water here. But in reality, there isn’t an infinite amount of clean water and our rivers are still being polluted by combined sewer overflows, urban run-off and littering. Household chemicals, fertilizers, antibiotics and organic pollutants find their way into surface and ground waters and this problem needs to be addressed at several levels. Some pollution comes from industrial and agricultural sources, but a lot of it comes from individuals and the EPA lists many ways citizens can help protect our bodies of water from pollution.

On the conservation end we spent a lot of energy heating water so we can take hot showers, run our washing machines and dishwashers and in general use a lot more water than necessary. Because there’s no critical and immediate need for conservation, the “conserve water, drink beer” slogan sums up our efforts in minimizing water use. I am an offender in the worst way - while I only turn on the dishwasher when it’s full, never run the tap unnecessarily and wash most of my clothes in cold water (and generally consider my lifestyle environmentally friendly), I love long hot showers! Particularly after swim practice, when the hot water just feels so good and shower time is spent catching up on team gossip.

Other parts of the world aren’t this lucky and one doesn’t need to leave this country in order to realize that clean water is a precious commodity (just go to the Southwest). Anyway, the UN declared today, 3/22/07, World Water Day in an effort to draw attention to the increasing water scarcity on the planet.

“The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say ‘I read a science fiction novel that says it’s not a problem.’ You take action.”

- Al Gore, March 21, 2007