Swimming: My background

I first started swimming when I was 4 years old. It was the summer of 1987. Hundreds of petrified kids would line up in a row on the wall, and ferocious instructors would bark orders at us.

Training generally worked on a premise of fear. My first few weeks involved me holding on to the wall and kicking furiously for fear of being caught out. I still remember one incident when I shouted out “I can’t take anymore!” The coach turned and roared in reply, “Who said that?!” I remember being absolutely terrified that one of my neighbours would tell on me; I still recall with fear the face of the coach shouting at us.

Coaches then were not afraid to use their stopwatches as whips to threaten us, and would often use the whips to physically hurt us. This attitude continued into the mid-1990s until a change of heart of the management of the club I worked for, born of evolving definitions of appropriate behaviour and furthered by a couple of controversial incidents that escalated out of control and led to trouble (to be described in an article to come.)

The next stage of my swimming, between the ages of 5 and 10, would involve me swimming once to twice a day, and approximately 4km a session. Typical training days went like this: be at the pool at 6am, run laps around the pool till 6:20am, stretch for 10 minutes, and swim from 6:30am to 8:00am. We would then go to school, and be back at the pool at 5:30pm. We’d run laps again for about 30 minutes, stretch for another 15 minutes, and swim in the evening for 2.5 hours or so.

Swimming had its “advantages”. For a month every year, I would leave my city and go somewhere else in the state or country to compete. I am told I had a reputation for being either absent or asleep while at school.

The swim coaches had their own hierarchy (based on a combination of paper qualifications and charisma): swimmers would get promoted from junior coaches’ “batches” to senior coaches’ batches with time and with improvements in performance. The most senior coach would handle the higher lanes and the older elite swimmers, while the more junior coach would handle either the younger elite swimmers or the slower swimmers. The hierarchy of coaches and which coach you swam with, would reflect in the kind of attitudes swimmers adopted with each other. For example, a precocious swimmer (or one who was lucky enough to reach puberty early) would generally be held in awe by the rest of the swimmers because they would be swimming for a coach a level above what one would normally expect them to be in.

“Stroke correction”, the term used for the periods when coaches would correct our strokes, was never a favoured form of training. We swam in a pool with approximately 10 swimmers per lane on average, and a coach managing every 2 lanes. There just wasn’t enough opportunity to correct every swimmers every flaw.

The pool was a 50m x 21m 8-lane outdoor unheated structure that began with moss on the floors and dirty green water in the 1980s, with occasional water snakes. Around 1990, a private group leased the pool from the government and converted it into a clean, blue pool that was cleaned everyday. We would swim in the sun and in the rain (since it never got very cold through the year.) Water temperature would be between 9C (50F) and 30C (90F) through the year.

Our competitive advantage in the 1990s came from the fact that we ran the only structured training programme in India, and what we couldn’t win through sheer talent, we would win through hard work. Swimming hard, and swimming a lot, made us far more fit than anybody else in the country, and it meant that every national and state competition was considered tied up for all events longer than 50m in length. And that’s how it worked.

Summers were a different training ballgame, since the “big” annual events would occur just after it. The hot months of April and May were “summer holidays” when we didn’t have to go to school, and we would train really hard during these months. The state trails would be held in June, and the nationals in July. There was no concept of yard pools or 25m pools (I discovered them only with the arrival of cable television in the late 1990s!), and all competitive events were thus LCM (long course metre) events.

Major national age-group events were

• the age-group nationals, held in July
• the zonal events (such as the South Zone competition, which would be held in November), where we would represent our clubs in the state trials, and the state in the national competition
• the school age-group nationals, where we would represent our schools at farcical district competitions, and then the district at the state level and state at the national level
• the annual open nationals, and
• the biannual National Games

which are open competitions which are age-unresticted. The National Games are the multi-sport Indian Olympics, and thus the most prestigious event on the Indian calendar.