The Secret Is Plunging Into Life

The swimmer takes two puffs of Proventil from an inhaler and three of Vanceril, medicines that help him breathe. He puts on a gray cap and a Windbreaker of the palest lavender. Ready to roll in tan slacks and brown bucks, he’s out the door of his contemporary house on East Island in Glen Cove, N.Y., and behind the wheel of a black 1996 Camaro.

“I like a racy-looking car,” says Dick Guido, who it might be said has the spirit of a Camaro himself--a man of clean lines who, in 80 years, has not let much pass him by.

At the Glen Cove YMCA, Guido (he pronounces the name “Guy-do”) changes into racing trunks. He puts on goggles and one of those flapperish bathing caps that make competitive swimmers look like extraterrestrials in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

In the locker room, Guido breezes past his doctor, Michael Dubin of Glen Cove, a pulmonary specialist, who is wrapped in a towel. “The bionic man,” says Dubin, nodding at Guido. Richard McCord, a Glen Cove city court judge who also has finished a workout, speaks respectfully of the swimmer as though he were William Rehnquist, and not Dick Guido, walking through nearly naked and carrying a pair of rubber fins. “He’s our pro,” says McCord.

Guido is in the water by now. Watching him begin the regimen of 25-yard laps is Ed Bogan, the Y’s executive director. Bogan recalls that Guido struggled with his health a few years ago--the swimmer suffered a paralyzed diaphragm in 1993 that temporarily knocked a lung out of operation--but kept showing up at the pool. Sometimes Guido would have to cling to the side, barely able to do a single lap. Now the swimmer does 75. “Remarkable comeback,” says Bogan.

Freestyle, Guido slits the water like a shark. Backstroke, he motors like an Evinrude. Butterfly, the swimmer is a dynamo--rising out of the water like something primordial, and then into the wash, and back out, and under again. Whoosh, swish! Whoosh, swish! At the deep end of the pool, Guido executes a classic flip-turn and barrels in the other direction.

*

He’s 80. He has one lung that operates at maybe 75%. The diaphragm problem left Guido’s stomach askew, which causes gas when he swims, very uncomfortable. He’s 5-foot-4--and shrinking, says Guido. “I used to be 5-foot-6 1/2.” But there he is, gunning down Lane 1 as though hounded by demons of the deep. He steams past the stand of 19-year-old lifeguard Andrew Morales, who says, yes, Dick Guido is something special--just how special the lifeguard will not realize, of course, for another 50 or 60 years. Resting for a moment, Guido deflects the compliments of an onlooker. “I’m hoping to make it look easy,” the swimmer says.

It does not look easy, however. It looks hard. It looks exhausting. It looks like something you wouldn’t let your grandfather do unless you were named prominently in the will. But Dick Guido, like thousands of other older Americans who participate in the United States Masters Swimming program, is not interested in easy. He is interested in health, achievement, companionship, competition--in the nearly inexpressible joys and mysteries that, for him, attend the sport of swimming. And, yes, he is interested in staying as young as his years allow.

“I think what I’ve done as a swimmer has helped me function well in my age group,” says Guido, who holds 35 Masters gold medals. “I look at my contemporaries. Many have trouble getting up in the morning. They look at themselves as old.”

Founded privately in the early 1970s, the Masters is a nationwide program open to swimmers age 19 and up--with the emphasis on “up.” About 10% of the more than 32,000 people in the national organization are 60 or older, and at least 300 are over 80.

“We’ve had two men compete when they were 100,” says Nancy Ridout, of Novato, Calif., president of U.S. Masters, which sponsors local and national meets in addition to aquatic exercise activities.

No one defies time, but the senior Masters crowd comes close.

“It’s hard to guess the ages of these folks,” says Diane Black of Atlanta, registrar for the Masters program. “They are in just incredibly good shape.”

Dorothy Donnelly, 75, a veteran Masters swimmer in Rutland, Mass., says the program helped her triumph over difficulties that might otherwise have been devastating.

“I had a broken hip three years ago, uterine cancer and a hip replacement--all kinds of cruddy things,” says Donnelly, former executive secretary of the Masters organization, who still goes to the pool five days a week. “If it weren’t for swimming, I wouldn’t be running around the way I do.”

At Masters meets, swimmers compete against times of individuals in the same five-year age bracket. On his birthday in July, for instance, Dick Guido “aged up” to the 80-84 group. The next month, he set a record for the 800-meter freestyle at a Masters national meet in Orlando, Fla. “I want to be a good competitor,” Guido says. “I want to do creditable time.”

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Guido has been racing, off and on, for nearly 60 years. He grew up in Manhattan and Queens--he swam at the Kips Bay Boys Club on Second Avenue and occasionally, he admits, in the East River--and was captain of the Brooklyn College team in 1941 after going undefeated in two previous years of competition. Guido left school to serve with the Army as a public relations specialist during World War II. In 1945, he returned to college and resumed swimming until graduation the next year.

Guido worked for the Topps bubble gum company in Brooklyn--among other duties, he test-marketed the firm’s new line of baseball cards--and then American Machine & Foundry Co. in Manhattan. During those years, Guido played water polo and swam competitively for the New York Athletic Club. But by 1951, Guido, his wife, Miriam, and their twin sons, Bob and Dick, were settled into their first house in the suburbs. Guido commuted to the city from Bethpage. Time was short. “I began to drift off swimming.”

In 1955, Guido opened his own business--an advertising firm called Concepts Co. that he ran out of the Bethpage house. He coached a team of youngsters in Levittown during the summers--Guido’s swimmers were consistent champs--but it wasn’t until he hooked up with the Masters program years later that Guido returned to form.

Guido swam in a Masters meet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1973. Thirty pounds overweight, he was not ready for the rigors of competition. “I came in 10th in a field of 10,” he says. “I was never so tired in my life.”

The experience may have been humbling, but Guido is not the sort to sulk. The swimmer responded by losing weight, training hard and starting a collection of Masters gold.

Then came Thanksgiving 1993. Guido felt as though he was in the grip of a cold. He took a break from swimming--he was doing as many as 100 laps in those days--but a week later went back to the pool. “I was in excellent shape. I had won several national championships.” When he resumed workouts, Guido knew he still was in trouble. Breathing seemed impossible. “I couldn’t get an exchange of air,” he says. “Damn near drowned.”

Guido persisted. He tried to swim again for the several days following--”I’m bullheaded as all hell,” he says--but with the same alarming results. He saw Dubin, the Long Island doctor, and then a physician in the city. After ordering extensive tests, doctors determined that he had suffered damage to the phrenic nerve, which controls the diaphragm, likely from an infection. His right lung had shut down.

Guido was going to live, the doctors said. But was he going to swim?

Their patient answered by hustling to the Glen Cove Y. At first, he struggled through one lap and rested. And then through another. He looked so bushed on a couple of occasions that lifeguards, fearing for his safety, asked Guido to quit for the day. But Guido kept coming back--a matter of pride, he says. A matter of style, says his wife.

“He doesn’t let life push him around,” says Miriam Guido, 78, a former librarian at Queens College. “He’ll never go gently into that good night.”

*

Now the phrenic nerve has largely regenerated, and Guido’s right lung is at three-quarters capacity. Guido has pep. He seems exuberant. He rises every morning before 6 to stretch and do light weight training. He watches his diet. He eats pasta. He’s in the pool five days a week.

A camera buff, Guido takes “adventure travel” excursions--trips that sometimes offer more photo-ops than amenities. He visited the former Yugoslavia “when the problems were beginning,” he says, and Turkey and Peru and the islands of Greece. He wants to go to Vietnam, where both his sons served during the war in Southeast Asia. “Hardball places,” says Guido. “Off the beaten track.”

Guido tends to his mind, as well. He just finished reading Stephen Hawking on black holes and has plunged into a history of Russia. He serves on the board of the Glen Cove Y, does volunteer public relations.

Swimming is the secret. Swimming keeps him strong, he says. In June, he plans to go to Morocco for a Masters international meet.

How long does Guido want to compete?

Until he can’t.

Into his 90s?

“I hope so.”

In the pool, Guido stops for a moment and talks about the demands of his sport. The butterfly stroke, he says, is particularly “unforgiving.” The body must come cleanly out of the water and return with grace. There must be control, balance, intensity. “Once you hit that rhythm . . .” Guido says.

He smiles.

He pumps his fist.

He swims.