Swimming Blogs - Mrs. Coach

Every now and then, just to boost the excitement in their marriage, Mr. Coach likes to coach Mrs. Coach. She is still new to the world of competent swimming – which is to be distinguished from the world of survival swimming which she experienced as a child in an East Coast town where there were no pools so she had to learn how to swim with the jelly fish and horseshoe crabs. As a result, she entered adulthood able to swim but with form best described as "paranoid."

However, a serious injury suffered a couple years ago brought her daily running regimen to a dramatic halt and after a couple of weeks of inactivity and realizing that she wasn’t going to channel her excess energy into something inane like housecleaning, she decided to finally embrace swimming. She also wanted to master a flip turn before the youngest of her children did because there is nothing more obnoxious than a seven-year-old who can flip turn better than his mother, the woman who gave him life itself.

So it’s been a long, slow building process. You would think, coming from a competitive track background, Mrs. Coach would have the leg strength and lung capacity for swimming. You would think. In reality, this has not been the case. Her shapely and supple calves are now pretty much vestigial, like an appendix or those little hairs on the tops of your toes. In other words, they’re useless.

And her desire to breathe whenever she wants was initially a very serious impediment to progress. Mrs. Coach would stop after a set of...something, and tell Mr. Coach, "I’m seeing little black dots and zingy things." And he’d say, "Well, don’t do that." And then Mrs. Coach would say, "Yeah, I’m laughing on the inside." And he’d be all like, "Ha, ha. Now go again at the top." And then she’d say she never knew how much Mr. Coach wanted to be a widower because at the rate things were going, he would be in about 15 minutes.

See, here’s the other issue with how Mr. Coach coaches Mrs. Coach – he coaches her completely differently than the athletes he doesn’t make babies with. Other athletes can dive in to do the fly, come up doing the breaststroke, stop about half way through for a breather and then finish upside down and feet first. They’ll climb out of the pool, come over to him for their critique and he’ll talk about the one thing they did right: "You know, Edna, I really liked the way you stepped up to the block there. That gives us something good to build on." And then Edna toddles off to the stands, feeling all empowered and glowing with positive self-esteem.

Mrs. Coach rips double-digit amounts of seconds off her 100 free, she surfaces (seeing black dots and zingy things) and Mr. Coach says, "OK, that was good, but here’s what we’re going to do differently the next time...." And then Mr. Coach gets an earful about how much money he saved not having to pay for epidurals.

So Mr. Coach tries not to coach Mrs. Coach too often. And that’s probably as it should be. At least for the sake of their marriage.