jock librarian

Hands down, The Rivals: Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova: Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendship (2005) is one of my favorite sports biographies. Howard's book piqued my interest in both athletes' personal migrations including Navratilova's defection from Czechoslovakia at the age of eighteen. I am currently reading Navratilova's memoir, Martina (1986), and have come to truly appreciate the tennis player's candor and spunk:

I didn't feel I belonged anywhere, until I came to America for the first time when I was sixteen...This country was waiting for me. It would give me the friends and the space and the freedom and the courts and the sneakers and the weight machines and the right food to let me become a tennis champion, to play the best tennis any woman ever played, which I think I have done in the past few years.

Excuse me if that sounds like bragging, but being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home of Dallas--Fort Worth, as as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.

And forgive me if this sounds like bragging, but a water country was waiting for me at Flushing Meadows this weekend. And it would give me the friends and the space and the freedom to swim the best 1600 yard workout in the Q-Boro:
400 free
2 x 200 IM
400 free
2 x 200 IM

The 1 train was running express this morning, so I arrived early enough at Columbia to crack open a sports memoir. Yum. Set for an early June street date, Off the Deep End chronicles 41-year-old W. Hodding Carter's audacious quest to qualify for the U.S. Olympic swimming team. To echo the mighty words of our dashing dryland coach, "Rock on!"

Here's this morning's main set, chicos y chicas. We began with a series of 15 x 100s:
1 x100 (Fly/Free/Fly/Free)
2 x 100 IM
2 x 100 Free
1 x 100 (Back/Free/Back/Free)
2 x 100 IM
2 x 100 Free
1 x 100 (Breast/Free/Breast/Free)
2 x 100 IM
2 x 100 Free

After an extended stop in IM Central Station, we swam 10 x 75s in the following pattern:
Swim/Kick/Swim (odds)
Kick/Swim/Kick (evens)

It was in a word: rigorous. And, to insert a quote from page 43, "The feeling was an epiphany."

TNYA recently hosted its annual One Hour Swim and over 130 masters swimmers from all over metropolitan New York joined the grand party. This year, we dedicated the event to our beloved Coach Paul and raised monies to support the good work of the AIDS Service Center and Ali Forney Center.

Our team is now focussed on preparing for June's IGLA Championships and we are so ready to train. McKibben's Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously has stirred me to action:

We want to expand the comfort zone, and to do that you can't be afraid of failing. In other words, if you run the first three kilometers, you may end up with a breakthrough time, and you may fall apart on the last 2K and need to crawl home. If you're going to expand your comfort zone, you're going to fall on your keister pretty often, said Lamb. And if you just keep it in that safe zone, you're going to go through life living in suburbia, and you'll never know what's in your heart and soul.