Strange Magic
“For the first time ever, I don’t want to get out of the pool!” the forty-something woman in the lane next to me said, looking up at the man sitting on the starting block.
I burst into a belly laugh that surprised me. And her.
She looked over at me. “Did you hear what I said?” she asked.
“I did,” I answered. “And I feel the same way.” I pushed off the wall and swam toward my friends and former teammates at the other end of the pool at Lucas Oil Stadium, under the Jumbo Tron, smiling underwater.
It was Sunday morning, June 23, 2024, the last day of the US Olympic Swim Trials, somewhere between 10:30 and 11 am, yet it felt like 1986, maybe 1987. It was like Hot Tub Time Machine, but real, and not a lame Bro Movie. After my friends and I had been in the water for about ten minutes, we were giddy, drunk with joy, our faces straining under our ridiculous grins. “I feel like we’re 20 and at practice again,” my friend Susan said. “This is so WEIRD!” I swear, we were all at risk of parroting those old Cocoon guys and exclaiming, “I feel tremendous! I could take on the world!”
Instead, my friend Michelle and I exclaimed, “I KNOW!” in tandem. We dove off the blocks in Lane 4, the lane where the fastest seed swims, did silly relays, laughed, and reveled in the experience.
It was amazing. Magic. Ineffable. The best kind of strange and wonderful magic that jumps up on you without warning or explanation. None of us expected this kind of joy from getting in a pool of all things. I mean, it was just a pool…
The group I was with was made up of former Olympians, National Team members, World Record Holders, and National Champions—the best of the best during their respective times. The group spanned in age from 95 down to people in their 30s. THE names in swimming were there. And this group, part of an alumni weekend, was granted access to the pool for 30 minutes on Sunday morning. I tagged along. I was with them not because I fit into any of the above categories (well, I made one National Team, in 1981, but that didn’t get me access to this group) but because my friends did, and they snuck me in. (Lucky me!) So, it was weird enough to be in the pool, with my middle-aged body, swimming with the best of the best from the 80s and earlier, and with my former Stanford teammates with whom I spent countless hours churning up and down the lanes, but to have that much fun?? To not want to get out of the pool? I didn’t see it coming. None of us did. The same sentiment could be heard from almost everyone in the pool that morning. What was happening?
Each of us had spent no less than 8 million hours in the pool, most of them grueling. All of us, to make it to that level of competition, did 11 practices a week for years, and we rarely missed. Being in a pool was not new, novel, or fresh for any of us. It was a place of the highest highs and the most brutal lows. It was the place where friendships were forged and solidified. It was the place where we pushed ourselves, broke through upper limits, and learned who we were. And at the end of every practice, we couldn’t wait to get out of the pool and leave it behind before we had to come back that afternoon or the next morning.
In 1979, Ellen Langer, PhD, a Harvard professor known as the Mother of Mindfulness, wanted to see if she turned the clock back psychologically for a group of people, would it be turned back physically as well.
I’m uber-paraphrasing here, but here’s what they did. They took 8 men in their 70s, and for a week, they lived in an environment recreating the year 1959, twenty years earlier. They lived in the past as if it was the present. At the end of the week, objective, physical measures of these men were more reflective of men in their 50s rather than in their 70s. Dexterity, posture, flexibility, hearing, and eyesight all improved. In a week.
The results of that study are hard to wrap one’s head around, yet I swear on all that is good and holy in this world that if you had measured any of those physical markers on the group of us before and after our 30 minutes in the pool, we would have presented at least 30 years younger. I’m not saying I was ready to take on Katie Ledecky in the 800 free, but I kind of felt like I had a shot. And it felt good, delusional, or not.
Swimmers are weird. There was something in all of us that allowed us to put our bodies through extreme workouts, to dedicate ourselves so completely to a sport, to train over 20 hours a week for an entire season for a race lasting around two minutes. It’s nuts. And we understand that about each other. It’s an unspoken nod, an aquatic Namaste, the weirdo in me recognizes the weirdo in you. We are kindred spirits.
One could argue that the magic we experienced that morning was due to the magnificence and energy of the never-done-before pool in a football stadium. I will admit, it was super cool. But I think we experienced something more profound. My college teammates and I spent more time with each other wearing a swimsuit, cap, and goggles than we did in normal clothes. I can recognize Michelle’s backstroke, Jenna’s freestyle, and Susan’s breaststroke as easily as I can recognize their voices. Having the opportunity to be together, in a pool, wearing a cap and goggles, something we haven’t done very often in the 35 (gulp) years since graduation, put us in the mindset of our teenage selves, like living in 1959 did for the old men in the Harvard study.
For 30 minutes, on a Sunday morning in Indianapolis, we were kids again. We weren’t post-menopausal women making excuses about how out of shape we were before getting in the pool. We saw the badass swimmer in each other and ourselves, remembering she had been there the whole time. We felt like we did in 1986, and it felt real.
We conquered time travel that morning; no hot tub needed.