Treading Water

By Vince Basehart

March 7 -- There's an old joke where a dimwitted man sets out to swim the English Channel. Half way across he gets, so tired he decides to turn around and swim back.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable course of action in my current oxygen-deprived state. I am churning my way across the indoor competition pool at Santa Monica's YMCA on 6th Street.

Justin, one of the lifeguards, claims that it is only 25 yards long. But to a gasping Lens, who since last summer hasn't taken any exercise more vigorous than a brisk walk, the other side of the pool seems to recede with every stroke like the landing on the church stairway moving away from Jimmy Stewart in "Vertigo."

The pool is six lanes wide and housed inside the massive John F. Drescher Building. It is enclosed within a completely blue-tiled area the size of a gymnasium. A lifeguard sitting on an elevated platform, similar to that of a Wimbledon line judge, keeps a sharp watch out for floaters.

Most of the other swimmers are regulars at the pool and easily thirty years my senior. They put me and two other middle-aged, out-of-shape desk jockeys, suddenly determined to begin a pre-Spring training regimen, to shame.

One way or another the oldsters are swimming continuous laps. One man seems to prefer a butterfly stroke, propelling himself down the length of the pool with an up-and-down bobbing motion.

Others do their own frog kick-back stroke-side crawl. And, as with any public pool, there is the skinny man in a Speedo with perfect form, relentlessly slicing through the water as sleek and silent as a Harvard rowing scull.

The place echoes with the sound of a hyperactive water wheel.

After several laps my heart is pounding in my chest. I realize it's not so much the swimming that winds me, but the required timing of the breaths that does. I abandon the classic swimmer's stroke and join the others by making up my own – let's call it "The Wounded Minnow" – which allows me to keep my head above water and mouth open.

It is hard work. I have sudden renewed respect for Mr. Rogers, who swam miles every day of his life. As I work my way back and forth across the pool I wonder if you sweat when you swim.

After about thirty minutes I'm pooped. I cling to the cement lip at the end of the lane, huffing and puffing just like the red-faced man about my age a couple of lanes down from me. We turn away from each other in shame as an octogenarian executes an Olympic quality turn-around in the lane between us.

I summon the strength to finish my workout by just kicking and treading water, not allowing myself to touch the bottom.

But the frown of the old man who is sharing my lane indicates that I should keep swimming or move over to the placid, empty training pool. My dignity will not allow it.

The three and a half-foot-deep training pool is where the Y stewards youngsters go from land lubber status to Mark Spitzdom, with programs named after aquatic creatures beginning with "Pike" and graduating to "Flying Fish."

In my current state of exhaustion I am somewhere between "Eel" ("child should be able to blow bubbles, prone glide and float on back with assistance") and "Starfish" ("child should be able to swim 10 yards, front crawl & back stroke without assistance").

Finally, I haul myself out, and, suddenly chilled, pad over to the bubbling 102 degree waters of the whirlpool.

I stop dead in my tracks. Bobbing there in the foamy soup are two of the hairiest men on the Westside. One resembles a hirsute Jim Morrison in his later years; another, a Yeti.

Suddenly the training pool doesn't look so bad.