Pier Pressure : Lifeguards: Leaping 40 feet from an Oceanside landmark, then swimming around it, is a time-honored tradition and test of fitness.

Two lean Oceanside lifeguards were delicately poised atop the citypier’s narrow railing, ready to jump into the churning water nearly 40 feet below.

An instant before they leaped, a fisherman suddenly dumped a whole bucket of fish guts and blood into the briny, and Matt Stephens and Tom Buckner found themselves following the slop down, dropping like two lead ingots.

“It was disgusting, I’ll tell you that,” Stephens muttered moments later.

Just another day in a time-honored tradition for Oceanside lifeguards who, since the ‘50s, have made swimming around the 1,900-foot-long pier and practice-jumping from the railing a ritual of skill.

Historically, it is part of lifeguard bonhomie, a splashy yet challenging way to shed stress and stay toned for the deceptively strenuous job of saving lives when seconds matter.

But, for the last four years, the jutting pier also has become the centerpiece of a killer workout for city lifeguards who must be able to run one mile, slosh quickly around the pier, then run another mile, all in less than 27 minutes.

The architect of this regimen is Stephens, the 30-year-old lifeguard captain who wanted a to make sure that his force of 33 lifeguards never gets too blubbered out to make a dashing rescue and have wind left to spare.

“It keeps you young, you’re down here with 16 year olds, competing against them,” said Stephens. “It feels good to beat them on workouts.”

He and Buckner, at 31, are the old men among the lifeguards whose average age is 23.

These two veteran lifeguards probably pack more exertion into 27 minutes than the average American male gets in a month, and, as their reward, Stephens and Buckner have not a trace of beer bellies and are untouched by the natural law of sagging flesh.

On this day, the bucket of fish guts aside, the swim around the pier is a 70-degree milk run, and the two emerge from the sea not even breathing hard. “To us, that’s just refreshing,” said Stephens.

But it’s rarely care free.

The water is fickle, sometimes so cold in the low 50s that many a young lifeguard has come out shivering, the chest heaving so hard that lunch has been unceremoniously lost on the beach.

That’s not the only peril to keeping one’s food down, and, Bucker said, “if it’s windy and choppy, it gets tough. You have to watch your breathing. If there’s chop, you get a mouthful of salt water.”

Hidden demons of the deep, both large and small, occupy a lifeguard’s imagination as he gracefully strokes out and back, trying to concentrate on making the trip in 12 to 15 minutes.

Lifeguards worry about getting a face full of jelly fish or startling a stingray, with their poisonous, pencil-sized barbs.

But the last thing Stephens and Buckner ever want to see up close is a shark.

“Yeah, sharks. It’s always in the back of your mind,” said Stephens, his quiet tone hinting at real fear.

Buckner, with one of his puckish observations, added, “Right after ‘Jaws’ came out, they caught two of ‘em.” Not exactly what Stephens cared to hear.

Visions of unlikely dorsal fins and a big mouth full of crooked teeth seem to concern the two men more than dropping themselves off the pier with such force that they plunge 10 feet under the water.

Buckner drolly calls this feat “semi-exciting,” but concedes that, after so many times, “the jump’s a piece of cake.”

Leaping from the rail has little to do with braggadocio and everything to do with practicing to rescue people who run into trouble near or below the pier.

Once, Stephens dropped into the ocean when an off-course sailboat drifted into the pilings and snagged, endangering the boat’s inexperienced occupants.

Some lifeguards circumnavigate the pier every day, providing an entertaining show to the tourists and fishermen who watch in awe.

Stephane Borgnine, a waitress at a restaurant on the pier, sees the spectators following the swimmers, who are alone or in groups, with their precision movement along the glassy, green water.

“People watch, they’re fascinated,” said Borgnine, who is commonly called upon to explain that the swimmers are training lifeguards.

Ray Duncan, the city’s aquatics superintendent, is the generational link between Stephens and Buckner and an earlier age of the lifeguard service, which began in 1943.

As a young lifeguard back in the early ‘60s, Duncan learned to respect the challenge of negotiating the waters at the pier, which is 1,900 feet long, about 1,600 feet of that actually suspended over the ocean.

“The average person could not swim around the pier,” he said, warning all but the best swimmers not to attempt the course. “For a lifeguard, it’s an enduring swim, but not an extraordinary feat.”

He called the lifeguards’ run-swim-run drill, “a grueling test.”

With lives at stake, that’s exactly how Stephens wants it, and he will understand but won’t tolerate a lifeguard who is timid about taking that long jump from the pier.

“The people who are afraid don’t come back the next year, they find another job,” he said.

The marks of his 13 years of experience are visible on his feet, scarred and calloused from wearing fins.

The fins, like the rigors of practice, are with a single objective in mind: saving people.

In their time, Stephens and Buckner have lost count of how many people they have pulled from the rip tides and the crashing surf off Oceanside.

“You stop counting,” Stephens said, then, after a pause, added, “It’s up there, probably close to 1,000, maybe more.”

A key to saving lives is that lifeguards usually know precious minutes ahead that a neophyte, white-skinned swimmer is about to get in danger.

By the time a swimmer is flailing around and getting dunked, a lifeguard is already racing down the beach.

The tip-off to trouble is watching as swimmers blithely drift toward the places where lifeguards know a rip tide is waiting to carry a person out to the deeper sea.

“There’s no way they’re going to know what the rip tide is about or how to get out of it,” said Buckner.

He, like the other lifeguards, has pulled off some bold rescues that left him shaken afterward as he wondered how he managed to avoid getting pounded into the pier’s pilings or onto the big rocks up by the harbor.

At his age, Buckner is pleased to be in top condition and is envied by the younger lifeguards.

“Two of the younger guys said ‘you amaze me, Tom,’ ” he said. He shrugged and added, half facetiously, “I amaze myself.”

The years flow by for a lifeguard, and Buckner, who contrary to the stereotype of a bronzed, bikini-crazy beach bum, has a masters degree in business administration.

He figures it’s almost time to hang up his fins.

But, Stephens said, “I don’t know, I think Tom will be a lifer.” For himself, Stephens added, “I could do this until I retire.”