Griglione Is Swimming Toward the Gold

Sitting in the narrow brick home she shares with her mother and father in a working-class neighborhood in Alexandria, Va., just across the alley, through the Giant Supermarket parking lot and across East Monroe Avenue from the Y, Michelle Griglione was ticking off the hours.

“Three hours a week for five years,” she said. “Seven hours a week in 1982 ... 10 hours a week in 1983 ... 15 hours a week from 1984 until now.”

She stopped and looked up, startled. It was a funny expression to see on the face of an 18-year-old who has always wrapped her life into the tidiest little packages.

“I’ve never counted them,” she said. “I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent in a pool.”

With a laugh, she continued, “And I don’t think I want to know.”

Michelle Griglione, an individual medley specialist who with luck and a strong kick may swim three events for this country in the Summer Olympics in Seoul, has spent more than 5,000 hours of her life swimming. That’s 208 days. Nearly 30 weeks. It’s like getting in the pool New Year’s Day and getting out at the end of July.

“And that doesn’t count the hours we spent in the car in Washington’s traffic jams,” she said.

And now, it all comes to a head. What Griglione has been working hardest for, the dream made strong by those thousands and thousands of laps, is hurrying up to meet her.

In August, she swims at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Austin, Tex. To make it to Seoul, she must finish in the top two in any race. She will swim five events. In at least three of them, it is entirely possible she will do it.

“You’re either first or second in the next minute or else everything you worked the last five years for goes down the tubes,” she said in a recent interview. “I can’t think of anything worse.”

Griglione also can’t think of anything better than this. She is taking a year off from Stanford to do one thing -- try for the Olympics. The rest of her life has been put on hold. Not that this is such a tremendous sacrifice. Griglione doesn’t see this time and effort as a hardship. She might not like the pressure she will face at the Olympic Trials, but she loves the buildup. Swimming simply makes her very happy.

“I couldn’t even think about not swimming,” she said. “When I talk about retiring from swimming, I’m not going to know what to do with myself.”

Perhaps she could start with normal sleeping patterns. Ever since she decided to leave her clothes in storage in Palo Alto and skip this academic year, she has awakened at 4:25 a.m. to wander over to the YMCA by 4:30 for the first of two practices. Home at 7 a.m. after swimming laps and lifting weights, she eats breakfast and takes a nap. After lunch, she does aerobics, plays the piano and reads, then returns to the Y at 2:45 to ride a stationary bike before another two-hour practice.

A couple minutes after 6 p.m., she is home for dinner. By 9 or 9:30, she is in bed to do it all over again the next day.

“People ask me what I do all day,” she said. “It sounds like I’m a bum, taking a nap in the morning. But I always tell them, ‘I’m working when you’re not.’ ”

Last year at this time, Griglione was spending a fair share of her time in tears. Her promising swimming career was a shambles. As a freshman at Stanford, she and her friends had eaten too many ice cream sundaes and ordered too many late-night pizzas. The Freshman Fifteen threatened to sink one of America’s top swimmers.

Her individual medleys had been second and third best in the world. She was the most decorated swimmer at the U.S. short-course national championships that year. A straight-A student, she was going to Stanford to be an engineer and a swimmer. Everything was falling into place.

And then, it all fell apart. With the added weight, she was swimming four or five seconds slower than she used to. At the U.S. championships in 1987, she managed only sixth-place finishes in both individual medleys. A fourth-place finish in the 200-meter butterfly earned her a spot in the Pan American Games, where she salvaged her summer with a silver medal.

Right then, she decided the more flexible collegiate training regimen at Stanford might give her more time to make friends and study, but it wasn’t going to earn her any Olympic gold medals. So she came home, to her coach, to the basic food groups, to her mother and father.

She is an only child. Her parents adore her. They have always been a threesome, from the earliest days when the college-age parents found a little pool for their little girl to swim in. There is nothing John and Carolyn Griglione haven’t done for their daughter. Living together again, if only for a year, is one of the nicest things that has ever happened to this family.

“Living at home?” John Flanagan, Griglione’s coach, was reflecting on a question. “It’s not so bad if you want to win a gold medal. It’s not so bad, period.”

“I like home 10 times better than any place else,” Griglione said.

She lost the weight she gained and now weighs 135 pounds. She is 5 foot 10. “She’s in great shape,” said Flanagan. She eats an occasional Girl Scout cookie, but she washes it down with diet ginger ale.

All it took was a couple of months to show Griglione how easily years of training could slip away. She considers herself lucky to have reached the nadir of her career with time left to rescue it. Last year was a perfect year to slump. This is the perfect year to recover.

And that she is doing. At the U.S. Indoor Nationals in March, she won the 200-meter individual medley and finished second in the 200-meter butterfly and in the 400-meter IM. She has the second-best time in the world this year in the 400 IM, third best in the 200 IM and third best in the 200 butterfly. She also plans to swim the 100-meter butterfly and 100- or 200-meter freestyle at the Trials. It’s conceivable she could earn five spots on the team, although highly unlikely.

Swimming today is high-tech, no-wave pools and muscle-bound training and serious, serious business. How strange, then, to find one of the world’s best women’s swimmers in the four short lanes at the local Y. And yet, what symmetry. Griglione’s first swim team swam there when she was 5.

Now she is back, in the same water, between the same lane markers, trying to win herself an Olympic medal.

For a half hour each day, she and her Y teammates cram into two lanes while a couple dozen day-care children strap on bubbles and do belly-smackers into the other two lanes. The kids shriek and splash. The swimmers churn in the same water. It’s an incongruous scene.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Griglione said. “It’s most important that I’m back here with my coach. I don’t even notice the kids.”

No one complains. Flanagan has coached Griglione since she was 12. In other sports, athletes graduate to new coaches from high school to college and college to the pros, but many swimmers prefer to stick with the person who first tossed them into a pool. Flanagan is at the Y with a first-rate swim team, so Griglione is here, too.

“This is a different person walking down the deck than came home from college last summer,” Flanagan said, watching as Griglione walked away to begin her sit-ups for the start of her afternoon practice. “She is leaner and meaner... There is no reason an athlete like Michelle, who has done what she has done, should think twice about making the team. I feel good she is going to do something fantastic.”

During her freshman year at Stanford, Griglione was in the same calculus class as Olympic figure skater Debi Thomas. Naturally, everyone knew Thomas. No one knew Griglione, except for her friends. The two never have met. But Griglione knows her well.

“I felt so bad for Debi Thomas during the Olympics,” Griglione said. “But all she did was fall down. It takes absolutely nothing away from her character. In fact, I think it adds to it. She wasn’t afraid to fail. She left school and dedicated herself to something. No matter how she did, she’s still a great person.”

For those hours and hours going back and forth at the Y, that’s something for a swimmer to think about.