Dive into the Water

Issue 231

Brazil, 2024

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I must have been about seven or eight years old when my swim coach asked me to stay after practice. I am standing on the tile deck, soaking, breathing heavy, about to sprint to the locker room, when I’m told to wait. The words surprise me, they come without warning, and I don’t know what I’ve done. But I am asked to head toward the starting blocks in the deep end. I look at the stagnant water, still lit by overhead lights but mostly in darkness. The pool is empty, the splashes and whistles and yells of practice having ended. And I hear the loud, scratching sound of a metal chair that coach drags across the tile, the metal scraping like a scream inside the empty pool.

I don’t really remember a time when my swim coach wasn’t an older man, although I know that this wasn’t always true, that my first swim lessons came when he was still energetic and active. My first lessons in the pool just happened to occur when I was around five, an age when nearly everyone that’s an adult appears unbelievably old. And those early perceptions seemed to have solidified in my mind until, after nearly fifteen years of swimming, the perceptions that I had always felt began to match the reality.

To a child’s eye, he was a large man, capacious in both body and speech, yet somehow light on his feet. He seemed to exemplify a character that’s more difficult to find in our contemporary world, a man very much of the previous century, who expressed his personality through his behavior rather than his words—there’s a purposefulness that reaches through the years and still touches me, a sense of discipline that’s apparent in how he spoke, in how he looked into your eyes, a clarity of thought that imparted clarity onto the listener, too, yet there’s also, unforgettably, a buoyancy and warmth and liveliness to my memories, as I can picture his smile, and hear his spirited, bellowing laughter. Perhaps it is this combination that’s so tricky to find in our contemporary world, this coalescing of a determined, critical temperament with a personality that’s also jovial, ready to laugh, that’s almost playful—what feels to me, now, as not too tense and not too loose but simply balanced.

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Coach, at this point, settles into his chair, his ever-present whistle dangling from his neck. He looks businesslike, as usual, but still cheerful. I don’t remember feeling any of the trepidation that I probably should have felt.

“Let’s try a couple of starts.”

During my early years of swimming, my starts weren’t exactly optimal. I believe that I raced for a good amount of time without achieving a start that’s appropriate for a human body. I was perfectly capable of taking the large step onto the high block. I was perfectly capable of curling my toes over the edge. I was even perfectly capable of bending down and grabbing the lower portion of the block with my hands. But that’s about the point in which the technique began to falter, because my next movement, at the start of the race, was to hop forward while maintaining that crouched position—my arms stretched to my toes, head tucked, legs vertical, in a way that resembles a frog jumping into the water, as I was told on many occasions.

Of course this was a tedious problem that forced me to begin every race in last place. Yet I don’t remember feeling any fear when I tried to dive into the pool, even though that would have been a reasonable assumption based on my pointless, inefficient feet-first hops. I just couldn’t get my body to listen, to straighten, to do what I wanted so badly, regardless of how much I tried to coerce my limbs. During this period, I expended so much energy obsessing about my starts—I would listen over and over to coach’s instructions, knowing that I had heard it all before, and I would watch how the older swimmers jumped into the pool with such ease and freedom, their bodies soaring through the air; and I did concentrate, I did struggle, believing that I could do it, that I would kick my legs behind me and enter the water like an arrow. So I would, once again, step back onto the block, bend down, grab the base, and then fall into the water, landing with my feet. I felt embarrassed, even ashamed, when everyone laughed, when they described how it looked. If I wanted to grow, if I wanted to develop, if I wanted to be one of those older and faster swimmers—those teenagers that looked like adults close to retirement—then I needed to learn.

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And on this day I take the large step and stand on the block. Its rough surface inclines toward the water. Coach sits inches away on that metal chair but he doesn’t look rushed. Dive whenever you’re ready, he says. Kick from your legs. Straighten it out. I concentrate, bend down, grab the block, and pause, right before the water slaps me. C’mon out, let’s try again. I pull myself from the water, step back on the block, dripping, heaving from lifting myself from the pool, then get another slap. Okay, okay. C’mon out, let’s try again. I pull myself from the water, step back up, and get another slap.

It took me decades to use the ladders in any pool. From my first swimming practice, I was told that pool ladders don’t exist despite what your eyes might perceive, and that using those nonexistent ladders would require some absurd number of pushups. Doing pushups as a six year old is only slightly more difficult than pulling yourself from the pool without a ladder, but that slightly counts for a lot when everyone is watching. Which means that this experience, a frog-dive followed by a strain to lift myself from the pool, again and again, is utterly exhausting—my breath is labored, my legs are wobbly, my thoughts are disoriented.

The principles behind an effective start in competitive swimming aren’t difficult to understand. Just like every other movement during a race in the water, you’re attempting to increase propulsion and decrease drag, the two variables that you have in a pool—with the typical symmetry and tradeoff that most increases in propulsion will also increase drag, just as most decreases in drag will also decrease propulsion. Finding the right balance between those two variables—from the right technique, based on your body—is what drives you faster. And the start is particularly curious because the moment a swimmer hits the water just happens to be, interestingly, the fastest they will move the entire race, which makes sustaining that momentum for as long as possible the goal in competitive swimming. Starts at the elite level might appear violent, intense, even loud, although if you look closer you’ll notice that elite swimmers strain to avoid any splash and actually squeeze their entire body into a narrow opening when they dive. When you jump from the block, you want to propel yourself both upward and outward: the upward thrust comes from the power of your legs, while the outward momentum comes from your arms. And when you soar through the air there’s a point in which propulsion starts to meet drag, because there’s a distance, depending on your strength and flexibility, where you’ve lost the ability to straighten. So you want to stretch the dive as far as possible, but you also want to enter the water in a narrow opening, piercing the surface with your hands above your head like an arrow and then bringing the rest of your body through that same point. If you watch elite swimmers, you’ll notice how their bodies appear to bend in the air—because after they leap, they pivot downward, straining to minimize drag by entering the water in a smooth, narrow opening. From the moment your toes leave the block to when you’re submerged takes a fraction of a second, but it can feel, once you learn how it’s done, like a reflex.

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I don’t remember talking with coach about these details on this day, though I’m certain that we discussed the proper technique. I’m certain that he tried, first, to explain the steps, to break down the component parts of the dive, as his instructions usually followed a familiar pattern. On this day, however, the memory that’s singed into my mind comes after those words must have skipped past my ears, because it is the physicality of these moments that has left its imprint, the hard, nauseating repetitions, it is the sensation of his arm that I remember, the force with which he conditioned my legs to lift into the air.

He holds a metal pole in the beginning. He positions it just above my feet, about level with my shins, as I stand on the block. All I need to do is kick my legs backward, push off the block, and soar above the pole. But, of course, all I actually do is hop, still landing in the water while holding my frog-like position, the distance from the block even shorter because I’m now jumping over the pole.

There is more conversation about technique. Some encouraging words and instructions. It has been a long time, and there’s no longer any noise coming from the locker rooms. A few swimmers walk along the deck, fully dressed, and leave the pool, with the next series of dives, for my mind today, still just as vivid.

I step back onto the block. Curl my toes over the edge. Bend down and grab the base. The metal pole is replaced by coach’s arm, in the same spot in front of my shins. When he’s ready—even though I’m the one standing on the block—he sweeps his arm backward with speed and power. There’s no problem at all, he says, if you kick your legs backward and lift into the air. Which means that my choice is either to dive in a generally correct manner or to fall forward into the water, as the result of what I can only call a trip.

I believe that we did this little routine an unreasonable number of times. A sweep. A hard knock against my shins. A fall. A slap of water. Then a pull from the pool, a climb back up, a moment to inhale, and another repetition, with my young body deciding that the certainty of falling into the water face first was preferable to the uncertainty of kicking my legs backward. Eventually, he was tired, which I considered a little insulting, as I stood on the pool deck, exhausted, dripping, a bit dizzy, but perhaps it was slightly gratifying, too, when I remember the value that I placed upon stubbornness at that age.

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Diving into cold water, years later, brings very different sensations, with exuberance and freedom and playfulness the first to mind; there’s a moment, just the very briefest of moments, in the extension of a dive, when you believe, falsely, that you’re floating, that you’re suspended in the air—no longer stretching into the distance, not yet dropping toward the water. And when diving does become a reflex, when it becomes the spontaneous movement that your body enacts even when you’re pushed into a pool, there’s a sense of tranquility in this moment of suspension, it feels unbounded, carefree, solitary, and, if you’re truly engrossed by the sensations of your body, limitless. As long as you hold that focus, it will be a very long time before the rush of water hits your skin.

My last practices with coach came more than a decade later. This was in the summertime, during the long course season in the United States, when a good portion of swimmers my age were taking breaks. When there weren’t too many other swimmers in the pool, coach would slide his metal chair along the deck and plop down right next to my lane, watching my sets from his seat, his health no longer the same. The basic principles of propulsion and drag hadn’t changed during those years—and there were still adjustments to be made. So there I was, more than a decade later, still shaping the position of my body in the water, because it never really ends. I had many coaches over the years, and that includes his son, but there’s a symmetry, I am noticing right in this moment, in how he was there at the very beginning and still on the pool deck for my last competitive race so many years later.

A few years later I stood in a long line that stretched down the street to see coach for the last time. I remember hugging his son, who I also consider my coach, and his wife, on a day that happened to be sunny. I was startled, for just a moment, to see that he was still wearing his whistle. The amount of people startled me, too, but just for a moment, once I thought about the amount of swimmers that pass through over the decades.

All of these thoughts came to me in a few seconds. In a gust of memory, I remembered the metal pole, his arm, the later years, all of them still ripe in my mind. I was standing on a boat just off the coast of Brazil, the anchor down, hesitating, in an unusual way, before diving into the water. I loathe those who delay in these moments—wondering about the temperature, asking someone else to jump first—but, on this afternoon, I found myself in that position for the first time, far above the water with my toes curled over the edge of a boat, the thoughts in my mind so far in the past. Yet the push always starts in your toes, it stretches your legs, and it drives you upward, tossing you into the air.