Swimming to Antarctica (2 page)

Three years later, when I was twelve years old, my father came home from work one winter evening, opened that same atlas to the pages depicting the United States, and placed the map on the dining room table. He motioned for my brother and sisters and me to look at the map.

“Your mother and I have been discussing moving. We believe that if you want to be successful with your swimming, you need to train with a top-notch coach. We’ve done our research and found that most of the best swimming programs are in these areas,” he said, pointing to Arizona, California, and Hawaii.

We crowded around the table, and my mother said, “We’re tired of the long, cold winters, and your father would like to work with a new group of radiologists with more up-to-date radiology equipment.”

I had never thought of leaving New Hampshire. I loved it there. I loved exploring the wide-open fields of wild red poppies and bright yellow daylilies, the deep emerald forests. I loved gathering brilliantly colored leaves in fall, and building snow caves in the winter. But I knew that I wanted to be a great swimmer.

My father said, “We need to make this decision as a family. If there is anyone who doesn’t want to move, we will stay here.”

For the next couple of weeks we discussed the idea and finally decided to move to California. And with each day I grew more excited. I’d never been there before, but I’d seen it on television and I expected to be surrounded by ranches and cowboys, and large orange orchards. When we flew over Los Angeles, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Below us in the haze of thin smog was a cement city that filled the entire basin, spread to the mountains, and expanded out along the coast. And I had this sinking feeling inside.

Somehow my father knew that it was important for the family to make an immediate connection with California so we would feel like we belonged. He drove us directly from the airport down the 405 freeway to the Belmont Plaza Olympic swimming pool in Long Beach. This was where we would be training with Don Gambril, the head coach for the United States Olympic Team. Gambril had an age-group club team called Phillips
66,
which we planned to join, and he coached a college team at California State University, Long Beach. In coaching circles, Gambril was known as one of the best in the world, and because of that he was able to recruit Olympic swimmers from around the world to swim for his college team.

The Belmont Plaza swimming complex had been built for the 1968 Olympic Trials. It was an enormous modern building of tinted glass and metal, situated on a plot of land four hundred yards from the beach, near the Long Beach pier. We stood outside, just staring at the building. Then my mother said, “Look, it’s open. There are people inside.”

I pulled the heavy glass door open and stepped into the spectators’ area. All at once warm, heavy, humid, chlorine-filled air engulfed me. Off to my right was an enormous rectangular pool fifty meters long and twenty-five yards wide. Only a year old, it was beautiful. The water was crystal blue, and the deep blue tile along the edge of the pool sparkled. From the moment I saw it I knew this was a sea of dreams, almost a sacred place. This was the place where the best in the United States had competed to represent us in the Olympic Games. This was the arena, the stage, where they’d played out their dreams, where they’d given everything they had to be the best. I could
almost hear the cheers of the crowd reverberating off the walls and glass windows and skylit ceiling. This building was full of energy, and I was absorbing it. I couldn’t wait to jump into that pool, and I couldn’t wait to meet Don Gambril.

We drove from the pool to a rental home. Long Beach was just one big city, and I didn’t like it. California was not what I had expected it to be. It was a concrete desert with palm trees. A place where all the cities ran together and all the houses looked alike. I felt boxed in, lonely, isolated, and I just wanted to go home. But that wasn’t possible. Our house in New Hampshire had been sold. My parents told us that we would have to buy a new one if we returned. I cried through the night. Nothing they did could console me.

A couple of days later, my brother and sisters and I met with Mr. Gambril. He was a bear of a man, five foot ten, a former football player with a thick neck, a crew cut, and dark brown eyes. I liked him. He was kind and had a quick smile and an instant way of making us feel welcome. He started the team on their warm-up set and pulled us to the side and told us what he expected of us. We had to be at the pool in time for each workout. If we were late we wouldn’t be allowed to get into the water. We would work out for two hours a day to start with, and if we did well we could eventually do two workouts a day, for a total of four hours. He told us he expected us to work hard, but also to have fun. He didn’t want us on the team if we didn’t want to be there. Then he explained what we could expect of him. He would coach us for the workouts and prepare us for the swim meets, and he would keep track of our progress during both. He also expected us to keep track of our times during workouts and get our results from swim meets. He told us he would always be available to answer our questions. “Do you understand all of this?” he asked.

We nodded. I glanced at Laura, ten years old; Ruth, seven; and David, who was fourteen. They were as wide-eyed as I was. We knew we were now in an entirely different league. This was serious. And if we didn’t follow these rules, we wouldn’t make the team.

We walked along the pool’s edge and stopped at each lane so Mr. Gambril could introduce the team members. Squatting down to their
level, he told us kids’ names, joked with them, teased them a little without using sarcasm, and told us funny anecdotes or habits about some of the kids, making them laugh. It was obvious that they loved and respected him.

Mr. Gambril explained that lane assignments were designated according to a swimmer’s speed, race distance, stroke preference, and age. Girls and boys trained together. The first two lanes were for the slowest swimmers. This would be where we started working out; as we improved, we would be moved to the faster lanes. Lanes three and four were for the fast age-group swimmers, five and six were for the Olympic sprinters, and seven and eight were for the Olympic distance swimmers. That was where I wanted to be, in lane eight.

“Do you have any questions?” he asked, willing to answer anything.

Mustering my courage, I said, “Mr. Gambril, how old do you have to be to swim in the Olympic distance lanes?”

There was a flash of recognition in his eyes. “Please call me Coach,” he said. “You don’t need to be formal here. You can be any age to swim in lane eight, as long as you are able to do the workout at the pace of the swimmers in that lane.” He knew that the difference in speed between the swimmers in lane eight and mine was like the distance between the moon and Neptune, an enormous difference; but Coach Gambril was the master of inspiring dreams. He made a long, high-pitched whistle through his teeth to get the swimmers’ attention. They were in the middle of a kicking set. “Hans, Gunnar, come on over here. I want to introduce you to the Cox family.”

As they kicked toward the wall, Coach Gambril told us about their amazing background: “Hans is from Germany, and Gunnar is from Sweden. They are on my team at Cal State Long Beach. Both are also training for spots on their Olympic teams. If they keep working hard, they have a great chance. Right now Hans Fassnacht is the fastest man in world in the mile and the fifteen-hundred-meter freestyle, and he has a very good chance of winning the gold medal for Germany at the 1972 Olympic Games. Gunnar Larsson swims the four-hundred medley, all four strokes, four laps each. He’s one of the
fastest men in the world for that event, and he also has a great chance of winning a gold medal in the 1972 Olympics, for Sweden. If he keeps working hard,” Coach added, making sure they heard him.

Sunlight as if from the gods poured down through the skylight in one solid, bright beam, illuminating Hans and Gunnar. As they stood up in the pool, glistening water streamed down their faces, rippled down from their wide shoulders, along their muscular chests, and tapered along their powerful arms. They looked like Greek sculptures of Olympic athletes, only better, for they were alive and they were speaking to me. I could hardly believe it as, in a strong German accent, Hans was saying to me, “Welcome to the team.” He extended his hand to each of us. It must have been twice as large as mine and thick with muscles.

Gunnar echoed the welcome: “Glad to have you join us.” His voice lilted with his heavy Swedish accent. And he reached up, too, and shook our hands. His hands were bigger than Hans’s, like paddles instead of hands.

Getting to talk with them was pretty heady stuff. But somehow I managed to reply, “Thank you. Someday I hope I will be able to swim in your lane.” I was a chubby, awkward twelve-year-old girl without any intense training and with no reason to believe I could ever be as good as they were. I was only filled with hope and promise. And they were also so much older than I was, perhaps nineteen or twenty years old. But they recognized that they had once been like me, at the very beginning of their dreams. And they understood what it was like to leave everything they knew behind, in pursuit of their dreams.

Hans smiled at me and there was real kindness in his brown eyes. “If you work very hard, someday you will swim here in lane eight with us.”

“And when you make it here, then you will have to work even harder.” Gunnar laughed. His light blue eyes shone. He had a pleasing face, oval shaped with a square jaw, light clear skin, and very blond hair.

Adjusting to life in California was difficult. Seventh grade was miserable; I was shy and felt like I didn’t fit in. In New Hampshire,
students never spoke unless the teacher called on them for an answer. Students never moved out of their chairs. It was so different in California. Classmates blurted out answers, and even turned around in their seats to talk to other students without the teachers disciplining them.

My parents always stressed that first I needed to be an excellent student, and second an athlete. So I paid attention, worked hard, and got good grades, but in my physical education class I was terrible. I was the slowest runner, the worst softball thrower, and during my introduction to gymnastics I broke my foot in two places attempting a back walkover. Worse than that, my physical education teacher, a woman named Miss Larson, disliked me. She thought I wasn’t making any effort at all in class. She screamed at me every day to try harder. I did, but how can you do better if no one shows you how? How can you make corrections if someone doesn’t show you what you need to correct? I dreaded being in her class and I even had nightmares about her. But in her class I made my first true friend, Cathy Kuhnau. We had spoken a few times in French class, and she had helped me understand French grammar. We were also the worst tennis players in Miss Larson’s class. Cathy was petite and I was chubby; no one wanted us, so naturally we became doubles partners. We tried hard, but we were both so unskilled that neither of us could hit the ball over the net. This became an advantage; when Miss Larson came across the court and yelled at us, we got her wrath together.

I was still unhappy in junior high school, but my solace was swimming with the team. Making friends with them wasn’t easy. When I swam on the team in New Hampshire, we took time to hang on to the walls and talk. The swimmers on the Phillips 66 team were so much more intense, even in lane two. No one stopped in the middle of a set and talked. No one suddenly did a somersault just for fun. Everyone was serious. Worse than that, I was always the last one to finish in lane two. It was very discouraging, but one day when Coach Gambril came by to check on the swimmers in my lane, he figured out what I was doing wrong. He had us doing a series of thirty one-hundred-meter drills in one minute and forty-five-second intervals. This meant
that we were supposed to swim two laps of the pool, check our time, and begin swimming again when the hands of the pace clock at the edge of the pool hit the one-minute-and-forty-five-second mark. Most of the swimmers got ten seconds’ rest.

Coach Gambril stopped me and asked, “What was your time for your last one hundred?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked like he was going to get mad. “Didn’t I tell you that you have to keep track of your times during workouts, so you know how you’re doing? Well, then, why didn’t you get it?”

“I never have time to stop. I had to keep going so I could stay up with the other kids,” I said.

“You mean to say that for the last six months you’ve been swimming through every one of these workouts without taking any rest?”

I nodded, sure that I was in big trouble.

He shook his head and sighed. “I’m so sorry; I should have been watching you more closely. It’s okay for you to stop. You need to take a break between each one hundred or two hundred, whatever we’re doing. From now on, I want you to take at least ten seconds’ rest.”

I looked down at the water, afraid that he wouldn’t understand.

“What’s wrong?” His voice softened.

“If I do that, I’ll be even farther behind the other swimmers.” I hated to be behind.

“That’s okay; by resting and working each set harder, you’ll get stronger. If the kids are doing a set of ten one hundreds or ten two hundreds, just do eight. If you train with more intensity, you will get faster, and I’ll bet it won’t be long before you are the lead swimmer in the lane,” he reassured me.

I could tell he cared about me, and he knew what he was doing, so I followed what he said.

He was right: within a few months, I was the lead swimmer in my lane. Still, it was only lane two. I wanted to continue improving, but I wasn’t sure what it took to become faster.

During workouts, Coach Gambril had our top swimmers demonstrate their strokes for us, to show the techniques they used to move
through the water. Sometimes we watched films with stroke analysis, but seeing the swimmers in the water with us made it so much easier to understand.

From lane two I began watching Hans and Gunnar, trying to see what they were doing so I could imitate them. It was obvious that they worked out with incredible intensity. Everything they did got their fullest effort. They never cruised through workouts or just got by. It was amazing that they could push themselves so hard. I didn’t fully understand it. I didn’t know that they were pushing through the pain and fatigue barriers; I was just trying to complete the workouts. But one day I asked one of the top breaststroke swimmers in the nation why she was so fast. She said that she worked hard on every lap, every single day. The message about what it takes to be the best became clearer.