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Creative Laziness ~1974

We thought we were getting away with murder.

Though the swimmers knew that Coach Spahn was an intelligent guy, we really believed that we could fool him at will. We thought that we were so stealthy and clever that he’d never catch on.

(Many years later when I became a swim coach myself, it finally became obvious to me that Spahn hadn’t been fooled for a second. He was letting us get away with stuff. We thought that the other end of the pool was far enough away to be outside his optical range, but believe me, from anywhere on the pool deck the coach can see everything!) But… an important component of leadership is the ability to know when to crack down, and when to look the other way. Spahn consistently showed such leadership skills.

Either that or he really did need to gulp down that giant cup of coffee every morning before his eyes became functional. I guess we’ll have to ask him.

Anyway, here’s a partial list of the transgressions we thought were going undetected:

The Hose

Rick Hall was one of the popular swimmers, probably due to his enthusiastic desire to embrace anything new and “hip”. We called him “The Trucker”, which was a reference to his immersion in cultural phenomena (see Dead, Grateful), not a reference to any particular vehicle-handling skills. In fact, he drove an Olds Cutlass, not a truck, but even so, riding with him was usually a white-knuckle experience. Everyone loved the Trucker, but I doubt anyone would ever hand him the keys to anything bigger than a station wagon.

The Trucker was a sprinter; he liked swimming short distances. Oh, he was certainly able to compete in longer events like the 200 butterfly, but he didn’t enjoy it. Nor did he relish doing long sets during workout. Unfortunately, Coach Spahn fervently believed in the value of long sets, and assigned them on a regular basis. Solution? The hose.

Trucker chopped up an old garden hose into sections about 18 inches long. He only shared them with a few special friends; folks he knew could appreciate the benefits of avoiding distance sets (i.e., the lazy guys). He explained how they worked: “Dude, you just put the hose on the bottom at the far end of the pool during warmup. Then when you get tired, man, just pick it up off the bottom. It’s so far out, man…you can stay underwater and breathe through it. Whoa…Righteous!”

So for the next few weeks, guys would disappear for a while during tedious sets. Well, OK, they didn’t really disappear – you could see a dark blob underwater, spouting a short section of green hose that was incongruously poking up into the air next to the lane rope at the far end of the pool. Mickey (the Fat Man) would take a turn, then Neugent, then Ulffers, and so on. If there was only one hose at a time, Spahn could never figure it out. Yeah, right.

Eventually, though, everyone discovered that it was actually hard work to suck air through a thin and smelly rubber hose while simultaneously fighting natural buoyancy and trying to avoid the swimmers who were actually doing the set. Choking was not uncommon, and getting kicked was a virtual certainty. Heck, it was easier to just swim the dang set.

The Trucker regretted the demise of his brilliant plan. “Man,” he said, “this is bringing me down. I’m bummin’, dudes.”

But there were alternatives:

Stationary Kicking

In the early days of the Wichita Swim Club, the organization was not able to afford the high-tech Styrofoam kickboards that you see at most facilities. Instead, some generous donor had provided the team with wooden kick boards made from big slabs of pine. They were much larger than the kickboards most swimmers use today, but were heavy to begin with. And the more they were used, the more waterlogged they became. Pushing one of these barges down the pool was just plain hard.

Solution? Just stay in the same place. I was a terrible kicker to begin with, so it didn’t take much for me to discover that with only a slight adjustment in the angle of my foot, I could kick my legs all day long without actually going anywhere. In fact, with some experimentation, I developed the ability to actually go backwards while appearing to be kicking in the normal fashion. I could generate a splash without creating momentum.

So, every time Spahn ordered a long kick set, I’d kick normally down to the far end of the pool, then vigorously paddle in place until everyone else had done the entire distance and it was time to head home. I’d end up traveling only two lengths of the pool while everyone else did 16 or 20.

Did I actually end up doing less work? I don’t know -- probably not. But sometimes, it’s just important for a teenager to feel that he’s getting away with something, I guess.

The Fence

One summer, Spahn decided that we needed to do massive amounts of distance swimming. Lots of 1500s (about a mile straight), scads of 800s, and even a significant amount of (gasp!) 3000s.

It took me about 45 minutes to swim a straight 3000. At the time, we deduced that either Spahn expected miraculous results from this über-training technique, or that he was a sadistic psychopath who couldn’t find enough cute little bunnies to torture and was therefore forced to take out his hostility on us. We all liked Spahn, so we assumed the former. (I’m not sure the jury ever actually returned with a verdict, though.)

(On second thought, it might be that he just wanted us to be occupied for 45 minutes, which would give him time to, oh, I don’t know…nap? I never thought of this before, but I do believe that there was a direct correspondence between the days Spahn didn’t have his big coffee cup and the days we did 3000s. Hmmm.)

The pool was surrounded by a nice, solid wooden fence. I’m not sure why a fence was needed here; it wasn’t preventing any unauthorized access to the pool (see “Dipping, Skinny”). It may have only been erected to provide a place to hang advertisements for the pool’s sponsor, the Love Box Company. In any case, it made a nice visual barrier when the need arose -- which it certainly did every time we were told to do one of those damn 3000s.

We’d swim a couple of hundred yards…just far enough to make sure that the coach was no longer paying close attention. Then it was a mad sprint to leap from the pool, charge to the fence and scramble over it. Then, for the rest of the set, you could sit behind the fence, keeping track through a knothole. Toward the end of the assigned distance, it was a simple matter to hop back over the fence and finish out the swim, making sure to act really, really tired at the end of the thing.

There were a few problems with this plan, though.
— One, the mad dash-and-climb effort itself was quite strenuous – and there was always the danger of splinters.
— Two, the far side of the fence was a field; there were scratchy plants and biting insects. You try strolling through a cornfield in nothing but a Speedo…
— Three, in addition to being mostly naked and barefoot, you’d be wet. If there was a breeze, it could get cold. And if you stayed out of the water long enough to dry, you had to deal with that whole chlorine-encrusted skin itch problem.

Yes, we did suffer for our pursuit of easy living. And Spahn just watched, sipped his coffee, and let us think we were clever.

Sadistic psychopath, indeed.