For Competitive Club Swimmers, Summer at the Pool Is No Vacation

For most high school and college students, a summer spent by the swimming pool is like a dream after nine months of studies, pop quizzes and seemingly perpetual homework.

But for the competitive club swimmer in Southern California, summer and pools translate into something akin to a nightmare.

Summer means more free time and more free time means more time in the water--swimming something like six hours a day, 20,000 meters a day, seven days a week. That’s twice as much as the swimmers do daily during the rest of the year.

“U. S. swimmers really don’t do anything else in the summer but eat, sleep and swim,” said Simi Valley swim team Coach Ingrid Daland.

To Southern California competitive swimmers training for national and international meets this summer, there are no vacations. Summers are training months, a blur of heaving water.

Summer workouts are a must. There is no choice.

“You can’t afford to take a summer off,” said Daland’s husband, Peter, the USC and U. S. Swim Team coach, who is in Madrid preparing the national team for the world championships Aug. 17-24. “There are too many people who are willing to pay the price.”

For U. S. swimmers the year-round battle begins in September and ends in August. Unlike the international swimming season, the U. S. season is divided into two sections--the short course (25-yard pool competition) and the long course (50-meter competition). International swimmers swim only in 50-meter pools.

The short-course season begins with training in September and ends for most at the NCAA championships in March and the CIF swimming finals in May, while the shorter long-course season starts in May and ends in August.

But because the long-course season is so short, many swimmers make the mistake of taking the summer off, swim club coaches say. “If you don’t train in the summer you become limited because swimming is a sport where you’re only as good as your work total,” said Peter Daland. “When you don’t swim in the summer, you really miss out for several reasons. Mainly you miss the hardest swimming and the best opportunity for training, since there is no school.

“It’s just like an escalator--if you step off the escalator in the summer, by the time you get back on, everybody else is way above you and, theoretically, you can never make it up. We used to have an expression--for every month you’re out, it takes two months of work to get back into shape.”

Those are months swimmers can ill afford to miss.

In the summer, days start as early as 4:30 a.m. Most teams hold an early morning workout and another in the late afternoon or evening.

“Most teams divide their summers into quantity and quality sections,” noted Ingrid Daland. “So you start the summer with heavy-duty conditioning, lots of mileage and base training, then you throw in some speed work and then, in the end, you taper and get ready (for the August meets). And you can’t go either way, you have to have all of it. It’s like building blocks . . . if you miss one, the whole thing doesn’t stand up.”

Some coaches believe the long-course season should be lengthened, which probably would mean changing CIF and NCAA scheduling.

“I’ve always wanted to increase the length of the long-course season,” said San Pedro/Peninsula YMCA swimming Coach Dan Halliday. “It just seems reasonable. We really don’t get started (training for the long-course season) until June, so it’s actually only two months of training.”

This summer has been especially short for Nancy Grigg, 16, who is competing in her fifth U. S. National Junior Nationals this week in the 200-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyle events in Austin, Tex.

Grigg, who prefers the long-course season, had to cancel swimming in her first senior national competition last week after her training was set back a month in June when the heater at the Verdugo Hills Swim Stadium pool needed repairs.

“I know I could have used more work, but that always seems to be the case,” said Grigg, one of five Glendale YMCA junior national qualifiers. “Sometimes it’s discouraging because you’re always wondering if you need more work.

“It seems like before you start, it’s over. The meter season is pretty weird. It’s like putting all you’re money into one pot and hoping something good happens.”

But to make something happen, swimmers must put in long, tedious days.

“What you have is pretty lonely because you’re face down in the pool and on your own even though you might have 10 other people in your lane,” said Ingrid Daland, whose team averages 16,000 meters a day during summer sessions. “It’s a pretty lonely sport. The workouts can be pretty tedious. Let’s put it this way--I wouldn’t want to do it again.”

Daily training for most swim teams entails more than 15,000 meters in the summer.

Some swimmers, like the Dalands’ daughter, Leslie, can peak at 20,000. The training seems to have helped.

“This is the best summer I’ve had,” said Leslie, who shocked the swimming world in July at the Goodwill Games in Moscow. She shaved nearly 15 seconds off her personal time to win the the 800-meter freestyle in 8:30.4. She came back two days later and shaved 16 seconds off her personal best in the 1,500-meter freestyle to win in 16:15.8, the world’s fastest clocking this year.

Leslie, who will begin her second semester at USC in the fall, continued her winning ways at the Phillips 66/U. S. National Long Course Championships last week with another victory in the 1,500 at 16:19.92. She also came in second in the 800 free at 8:36.8

“It’s just been one of those summers,” said the red-haired youngster, who also managed to work a part-time job at a bakery during the summer.

Leslie Daland has also had to contend with an old foe this summer--tendinitis. For three years she has been hampered by the recurring ailment, common among swimmers, in her shoulders.

“She’s learned to live with it,” said her mother. “She’s used to it. She knows just how far she can go. She can work up to the pain and back.”

Grigg understands the pain. She has battled tendinitis in her left shoulder for three years. At one point in June, the pain was so intense that the 5-foot-5 16-year-old had trouble lifting her arm above her head.

“I’ve gone to lots of doctors, but all they tell you is to rest and take aspirin,” said Grigg, who also uses hot and cold treatments, ultrasound sessions and muscle stimulation therapy to relieve the pain. “They just don’t seem to understand that you can’t take a week off because the summer is so short.”

Long-course training leaves room for little else, especially jobs. Most competitive swimmers have never been employed.

“Summers are only a problem for kids who try to work,” said Glendale YMCA Coach Dale Lundin. “If you want to excel you cannot work. There have been many who have tried it, but I don’t know of anyone who has succeeded.”

“I couldn’t handle getting a job,” said Grigg. “I’m too tired as it is after swimming. I imagine I’d just become a vegetable if I got a job.”

There are exceptions.

Leslie Daland uses the bakery job to break the monotony of summer.

“It was good for me to do something different,” said Daland, who also liked the money. “(My job) helped me get through the summer.”

But while Leslie insisted that her job did not hinder her swimming, her mother differed.

“Leslie doesn’t think it affects her, but I can see it,” Ingrid said. “She gets crabby and does poorly in workout. Then she gets a poor attitude and won’t try as hard. Then the times get lousy.

“One day when she didn’t have her nap she swam a 1:09 (200-meter freestyle), then the next day (when she didn’t work) she swam a 1:04. I rest my case.”

But working 30 hours a week as a lifeguard at the Torrance Plunge has not hurt Ron Corpus’ times. Corpus, 17, a freshman-to-be at Long Beach State, was one of five Southern California swimmers chosen to compete at the U. S. Sports Festival in July, where he finished seventh in the 100-meter breaststroke.

“It’s just a matter of budgeting your time wisely,” said Corpus, one of 12 San Pedro/Peninsula YMCA swimmers competing at the junior nationals.

Stacy Shupe thought about taking a summer off after swimming poorly at the World Championship Trials in June.

“After the trials, I didn’t know if I wanted to train this summer at all,” said the Industry Hills swimmer, who finished ninth in the 800-meter freestyle qualifier. “I wasn’t doing my best times and didn’t seem to be getting any better. So why I do it? Was I just going to train all summer and swim badly at the nationals?

“That’s when I felt like maybe I should just go out and get a job like a regular person.”

But Shupe, 5-8 and 140 pounds, remained resilient. The 20-year-old lost almost 10 pounds in a month and recorded some of her best times since 1984 at the nationals, finishing sixth in the 1,500 (16:40.2) and seventh in the 800-meter freestyle (8:42.1).

“I think I proved something to myself--that I’m not an over-the-hill swimmer,” said Shupe, who will be a junior at Stanford this fall. “I still have it. I’m actually glad I swam this summer.”

But intensive summer training is not for everyone.

“We try to tell the kids that if you’re spending three or four hours a day swimming and you’re not having tremendous success maybe you ought to try something else,” said Ingrid Daland. “There is more to life than swimming. If you are not of junior or senior national level, you should not go three or four a day because it will burn you out.”

John Overstreet will probably never compete at the national level, but that doesn’t stop the 21-year-old from training. Overstreet, who swims competitively at Fresno State, has not missed a 6 a.m. workout for the San Pedro/Peninsula YMCA Swim Club this summer.

But Overstreet, who will be a senior, does not swim in the summer for the competition--he works out to stay in shape. Overstreet, whose best event is the 200-yard butterfly, spends his school break earning money for college as a full-time Los Angeles County lifeguard at Hermosa Beach. Swimming is only a hobby for him this summer.

“I swim because I enjoy the sport,” said Overstreet, in his first summer with the San Pedro club. “I like being in good condition. As a lifeguard, I feel 100% more comfortable knowing I can go in the water 17 times on a rescue and still feel good at night. I feel I owe it to myself to keep going.”

Klaus Christensen never imagined summer training could be so difficult. Since coming to California last September, the 18-year-old exchange student from Odensen, Denmark, who came to the United States to “learn English and swim,” has been training at Industry Hills.

“It’s a lot harder here,” said the blond, blue-eyed, 6-2 Christensen, who will return to his homeland Aug. 24. Since he began training at Industry Hills, Christensen, who is competing in the 100- and 200-meter butterfly and 200-meter freestyle at the junior nationals, has doubled his total in workouts to almost 14,000 meters.

Ingrid Daland said her team swims so much because “the coach in the next town team is doing more. Competition is stiff, so in order to keep your swimmers, you have to do more.

“It’s all financial (the swimmers pay team fees). If I was to tell my team that we aren’t going to have any more morning workouts, they’ll go to another team. So it’s a matter of income. You have to have so many bodies to float your team.”

Daland doesn’t necessarily believe that more is always better.

“I’ve talked to East German swimmers and they don’t do half the stuff we do, but they’re better than us. Every time the foreign coaches hear what we’re doing, they’re amazed because they’re not doing half as much. So you wonder.”

The Industry Hills Swim Club is doing more than just wondering about how much swimming mileage is enough.

Johns Ries, Industry Hills director of aquatics, and Coach Ed Spencer are trying to come up with an answer.

“We’re finding more quality in less distance,” Ries said. “I have never been an advocate of long days and tons of mileage.”

However, like others, Ries feared that if his team didn’t swim long distances, it could be the wrong approach.

“I’ve never been a guy that thinks you should go six or seven hours a day. I just won’t do it,” he said.

Besides cutting evening workouts to three days a week, Spencer, the senior national swim coach, is altering his workouts.

“Maybe we have not been doing right by being more interested in swimming fast in workouts all the time,” Spencer said. “I’m trying to follow what the U. S. Swimming sports medicine section is trying to bring home--that we should be doing more to scientifically deal with our athletes.”

To this end, Spencer and his swimmers have been experimenting by using pulse rates to monitor workouts. Spencer is even thinking of purchasing a blood lactate analyzer to monitor swimmers more accurately.

“I know the Eastern Bloc countries have been doing that for a long time,” said Spencer, whose senior national swimmers still averaged 17,000-meter combined daily workouts under the new system. “They’re no longer experimenting with it, they’re doing it. They’re using scientific knowledge to analyze swimmers.”

Despite lengthy workouts, it has been a pleasant summer for 12-year-old Deborah Kory of the San Pedro/Peninsula YMCA Swim Team. She has accomplished everything she set out to do this summer. Kory, 5-8, won the 50- and 100-meter breaststrokes for the 12-13-year age group at the McDonald’s Junior Olympic Championships at Industry Hills this month in her first full-workout summer. Both (50 in 37.2 and 100 in 1:22) were national top-10 times for her age group.

“The last few years I’ve been going (to summer practices), but not a whole bunch. This summer was different. I really felt like swimming this summer. I found out you really get out of it what you put into it,” said Kory, who finishes summer training this week at the Western Zones meet for Junior Olympic all-stars at Colorado Springs.

Linda Escobar has given more than just her time this summer--she has also sacrificed her job. Escobar, 15, quit as a summer lifeguard at the Santa Monica College pool to concentrate on swimming with the Tanden Swim Club of Santa Monica.

The sacrifice has paid off. The Santa Monica High School junior has qualified for her first junior national competition in the 50-meter freestyle.

“Usually I lay back and rest during the summer, but this year I’m sticking to swimming,” said Escobar who, along with Alex Haddox, 15, will swim the 100-meter backstroke. They are the first Tandem junior national qualifiers since 1983. “It’s grueling but kind of fun.”

Sunday marks the unceremonious completion of the summer long course for most swimmers, ending more than 11 months of almost non-stop training. Some will catch up on rest before the short-course season begins in September. Others will take that earned family vacation.

“I think I’ve earned it, “ said Shupe, who plans to go water skiing before she starts training again for the short-course season in the second week of September. “Everybody needs a little time for themself. It’s a time in your life when you don’t have to be a swimmer. I’m looking forward to a little time off.”