Dear Maria

Dear Maria,

I'm sorry you won't be playing in the US Open this year because of your injured shoulder. I hear you are recovering in Scottsdale. Maybe I'll run into there. Keep up with your physical therapy and I'll look for you at the Australian Open.

Open Water.

Earlier this summer I competed in a triathlon in which the first leg was a half mile swim in a lake. Up until that moment, all my competitive swimming events had happened in a swimming pool with lane lines and a black line on the bottom of the pool. But open water swimming is not for the faint of heart .

Earlier this week, the Women's Olympic 10K open water swim was held. One the competitors was South African swimmer Natalie Du Toit . She lost her leg in a motorcycle accident. Prior to that she was an up and coming competitive swimmer. I can't imagine how difficult it must be swimming with one leg. But upon returning to training after her accident, she decided to join the merciless sport of open water swimming where competitors have known to kick each other so hard that swimmers have broken bones. Not the mention battling dealing with conditions like jellyfish, ocean swells, and currents. You might think it would be a drawback. But this quote from an ESPN profile just about sums it up:

"Swimming is something where I can take my leg off and be completely free in the water," she said. "That's who I am."

Du Toit finished 22nd. With all the attention that countries place on medal count , athletes like Du Toit serve as embodiment of the true Olympic ideal.

Usain Bolt puts on a Phelpsian performance

Three golds, three world records .

Bolt and Phelps are *THE* story of these Summer Olympics.

What is the IOC President thinking?

Dan Wetzel over at Yahoo Sports
has an excellent column about International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge giving lightning fast double gold medalist Usain Bolt a hard time about this post-race celebrations. I watched Bolt in his 100 and 200M victories. It was stunning to see a human run that fast. Sure, he probably could have gone a lot faster in the 100 if he didn't start celebrating with 20 meters left, but hey he broke his own world record. Who is Rogge to tell him how to act? In the 200 he broke Michael Johnson's record and ran hard the whole race, beating his closest competitor by a body length. I'm sure Bolt's antics would have cost him a penalty if he was playing football. But this is track and field.

If Rogge wanted to call out an athlete for poor sportsmanship, he should have called out Swedish wrestler Ara Abrahamian , who *threw his bronze medal* in disgust and walked off the podium during the medal ceremony.

Olympic highs and lows

I'm still speechless at Michael Phelps is performance last week at the Water Cube. The scene of him hugging his mother and sisters after his last race was touching. I may never see such an extraordinary athletic performance in my lifetime.

In contrast, not all athletes ascended to the medal stands. Lolo Jones (I love that first name) failed to clear the last two hurdles in the 100M events. She was in the lead, but finished seventh. I was reading some background on her , and she as such an amazing story. After growing up in poor circumstances and earning a track scholarship to LSU, she wanted to continue in the sport. Without endorsement deals she worked part time at Home Depot and refused to turn on the AC on really hot days. The picture above is almost painful to look at. I really hope she gets another chance in 2012.


American sprinter Tyson Gay didn't make it to the final round of the 100M dash. I don't follow track, but I do know that between he, Asafa Powell, and Usain Bolt, the three of them had run some of the fastest times in history. I was really looking forward to watching all of them race. After watching him race in his semifinal heat and realizing he didn't make the finals, you could tell it hurt. He still gave an after race interview to the NBC reporter on TV. From an NY Times article on his defeat:

“After I took my spikes off, put my shoes on, and started to walk to the warm-up track, it had already hit me,” Gay said Sunday. “Drummond came over and said, ‘I know you didn’t quit. I know you gave it your all.’ When he said, ‘You gave it your best,’ it hurt, because I did. The tears started coming. When you give it your best and you lose, it hurts a lot more.”

Perhaps the most heartbreaking story of the games is that of Lui Xiang , Chinese hurdler, defending Olympic champion, and from what I read the biggest sporting icon in China. He injured his foot was was unable to compete. Even his coach was in tears .

Perhaps the measure of a true champion is how one handles defeat. All these athletes were gracious in their losses. And I really hope they all get another chance to compete in another Olympics.

I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier

Probably my favorite commercial while watching the Olympics is this Nike ad.
The song is from The Killers. One of the several athletes that flash by on the screen is Paula Radcliffe , a British long-distance runner. Before the swimming competition last night, NBC showed the women's marathon. Paula was easy to spot in the crowd of runners at the beginning of the race with her tall frame and sunglasses. As the race wore on to the last 10KM you could tell she was in pain and even stopped for a bit. Here is a a good re-cap of her performance . But just from watching her on TV, I could tell it was a gutty performance and another inspiring athletic performance I've seen during the Olympics.

Epic.

Growing up in Arizona its quite natural to take swimming lessons in the summer. My parents put a backyard swimming pool in when I was 8. It took me a while to get over my fear of the deep end of the pool. Granted, now that I'm 6' 7'', eight feet doesn't seem that far down, but when you are eight it does. I eventually got over my fear of swimming. The next four summers I swam on the city recreational swim team and then joined the local swim club for the next two. For how tall I was, my speed in the pool was never proportional to my height. It was frustrating. When you are tall people expect you to be good at sports (or at least play basketball - I was good but not that good at the sport either) When I was 13 I was warming up at an age group meet and one of the other coaches commented to my Mom, that based on my form I had a lot of potential.

That potential never materialized. I swam all four years in high school, but never lettered. My last race in high school was 100M freestyle and I was really wanting to go under a minute. I was swimming best times leading up to the race, but I mis-judged my last flip turn and didn't get a good push off the wall. For the next 10 years only went swimming again twice. After developing chronic back problems in 2005, it decided to take an adult swim refresher course in Sept 2006. For the past two years I've been swimming at least 3-4 times a week.

After watching the amazing performances of Team USA swimming the past 8 days, I'm so glad to be a swimmer. In particular, Michael Phelps' performance of 8 gold medals has just been epic. I'm 6'7'', but I can't really relate to the NBA basketball players I watch on TV because I'm not that coordinated on the court. But when I watch Phelps' butterfly, Jason Lezak's anchor leg freestyle, or Brendan Hansen's breastroke, or Natalie Coughlin's backstroke, I can relate to it a little better because I swim those same strokes, but several orders of magnitudes slower and not as ascetically pleasing. To perform as well as Phelps has under such pressure where 0.01 seconds can be the difference in getting gold or silver, is just phenomenal. And it makes me so happy that after a long hiatus from the pool, I returned and will be staying in for a lifetime.

Swimming is a fountain of youth

Janet Evans is hot.

Olympic Couch potato

I've been watching NBCs coverage of the Olympics every night in primetime. I'm pretty sure Bob Costas has said the name "Michael Phelps" a million times and you'd think the US has a one man swim team. Last night before the 100M freestyle, Cris Collingsworth (who does football for NBC - I think he's a former player too), was interviewing Jason Lezak about his phenomenal (and I think legendary) relay anchor leg. I realize NBC has promoting Phelps' a lot, but there are a lot of talented swimmers on the team as well. During the course of the interview, Collingsworth said something to the effect of It must have felt good to help Michael get one of his 8 golds. Lezak is a big dude at 6'4'' and he just had a blank look on his face. Like he didn't have vested interest in winning a race that the US had lost the last to Olympics?

Another point. Women's beach volleyball. I'm not complaining, I like seeing all 6'3'' inches of Kerri Walsh and her partner Misty May destroying their competitions while wearing bikinis. But I would like to see some other sports too. Men's or women's indoor volleyball, tennis, judo, even ping pong or badminton.

All I'm saying there are alot of sports in the Olympics. It would be nice to showcase them in primetime to Americans who might not be exposed to them.

In the shadows

I had a hard time falling asleep last night after watching the Men's 4x100 freestyle relay come from behind and hold off France to set a new world record (by nearly 4 sec!!!). the video is here .

But there were a couple of tough defeats yesterday too for two of my favorite US swimmers, Katie Hoff and Brendan Hansen. Hoff was racing in a stacked 400M freestyle finals heat that included the world record holder and defending Olympic champion from 2004. She was pulling away and the 300M mark and I was sure she was going to win it. But she got out touched at the last second by a swimmer from Great Britain.

Next, is Brendan Hansen. He hasn't been swimming very well and was shut out of the American roster spot of the 200M breastroke at the Trials. But here he was in the 100M breastroke finals yesterday, battling against his rival Kosuke Kitajima . Hansen was fourth, shut out of the medal stand and his rival ended up setting a new WR. Its funny, Hansen has owned that event since Athens, and he is one of the most accomplished American swimmers in his events. But the clock doesn't lie. The NY Times has a nice piece on Hansen.

Hansen has one immeasurable thing in his favor: Defeat has left him publicly gracious instead of bitter. Before these Games began, he reflected on his fourth-place finish in the 200 breaststroke at the Olympic trials last month, which left him ineligible here. “I’ve always believed the character of an athlete is defined by failure, not success,” Hansen said. “Unfortunately, that was my shining moment. That was the biggest failure of my career.”

....

“In the United States, we raise the bar so high on ourselves,” Hansen said. Then, referring to Michael Phelps, he added, “Now to even be noticed, you’ve got to win eight gold medals. The poor guy’s swimming his mind out. And everybody’s saying, ‘Okay, one down, seven to go.’ Let him enjoy the one. You don’t know how hard it is to get on the blocks and do what he’s doing.”

Minutes later, Phelps won a second gold medal in an astonishing 4x100-meter freestyle relay. A half dozen are expected to follow. Hansen, and every other American swimmer, will now slip into Phelps’s shadow. He seems okay with it. He may have lost a race, but, apparently, not his sense of proportion.

If I had to choose a swimmer I wanted to meet from the US national team it would be him. I need help on my breastroke, but he just seems like such a down to earth, humble guy.

Focusing on what you can do

Well, I've been an Olympic couch potato so far this weekend. Events I've watched so far are men's rowing, women's basketball, women's volleyball, men's beach volleyball, men's cycling, and the swimming preliminary heats in the 400IM, 400 freestyle, 100 breastroke, and 4x100 relay.

Being tall myself, tall women always catch my eye. One of the women's players on the US team, Tayyiba Haneef-Park is 6'7'' tall!!!!. Amazing. Team USA beat Japan today in 4 sets. I thought everyone in Japan was relatively short, but some of the Japanese players were 6'1'' tall!

American beach volleyball Phil Dalhausser is 6'9''!!! He and his teammate were upset today by the beach volleyball team from Latvia, which was a huge upset apparently. I didn't even know they played beach volleyball in Latvia!

I'm a newbie to the world of cycling, having just bought a road bike a few months ago. I didn't watch much of the Tour De France, but I did watch the men's road race today. It was amazing to see these guys keep up such a high cadence under such tough conditions (it was 112 degrees on the road). I know cycling hasn't had the good press lately with all the doping scandals, but Spain is having a banner year in cycling.

While I'm waiting for Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte duel it out in the 400IM tonight, I read this amazing article about how is mom raised her son with ADHD . Training to be an Olympic swimmer takes a lot of focus and a lot of laps in the pool (I'm sure Phelps swims over 50miles a week). It takes a lot of focus. That's why I was so surprised to read he was diagnosed with ADHD and was put on ritalin when he was nine. (He stopped taking it tw years later) Phelp's teachers didn't believe he would amount to very much:

In the elementary grades at their suburban Baltimore school, Ms. Phelps said, Michael excelled in things he loved — gym and hands-on lessons, like science experiments. “He read on time, but didn’t like to read,” she said. “So I gave him the Baltimore Sun sports pages, even if he just read the pictures and captions.”

She will never forget one teacher’s comment: “This woman says to me, ‘Your son will never be able to focus on anything.’ ”

And then he discovered swimming:

At age 12 Michael needed an algebra tutor, and was so antsy in school that his mother suggested the teacher sit him at a table in the back. And yet he willingly got up at 6:30 daily for 90-minute morning practices and swam 2 to 3 hours every afternoon.

By 15, in 2000, he was at the Olympics; at 16 he had his first world record; and by 19, at the 2004 Olympics, he had won 8 medals, 6 of them gold.

Of all his mental gifts, the one that amazes his mother the most is this: “Michael’s mind is like a clock. He can go into the 200 butterfly knowing he needs to do the first 50 in 24.6 to break the record and can put that time in his head and make his body do 24.6 exactly.”

He always did his swimming homework. “In high school, they’d send tapes from his international races,” Ms. Phelps said. “He’d say, ‘Mom I want to have dinner in front of the TV and watch tapes.’ We’d sit and he’d critique his races. He’d study the turns — ‘See, that’s where I lifted my head.’ I couldn’t even see what he was talking about. Over and over. I’m like, ‘whoa.’ ”

Its just seems like Phelps was born to be a swimmer.

More to the point, I think, is the moral of her story, which offers hope for parents of any child with a challenge like A.D.H.D.: Too many adults looked at Ms. Phelps’s boy and saw what he couldn’t do. This week, the world will be tuned to the Beijing Olympics to see what he can do.

True American Athlete

Lopez Lomong is carried the flag for the U.S. Olympic Team. His is a truly remarkable story - he was a Lost Boy from Sudan, spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya where he watched Michael Johnson in the 2000 Olympics on a black and white television. Eight years later after coming to the United States (he became a citizen in 2007), he made the US track and field team in the 1,500M.

Amazing. Its stories like this are why I like the Olympics.

Olympic Cats

Well, if the University of Arizona was its own country I think Wildcat Nation would do pretty well. You can see the impressive list of UofA affiliated athletes and coaches here . One of them, Lacey Nymeyer , who is swimming the 100M freestyle and on the 4x100 freestyle relay has a feature story in the Arizona Alumnus magazine . (I have to say, she's cute ;) This quote of her in the magazine story caught my attention:

"I just love being in the water. I want to swim every day and I never dread having to work out. There's just something about being in the water that's calming and energizing at the same time. When you're swimming and you've got the water below and the sky above, you're in a perfect place."

She understands that people might think that swimming workouts would get maddeningly repetitive after so many years, but she counters that repetition only serves to help her find consistency.

Considering she is world class athlete and her practice sessions are very demanding, the fact that she looks forward to them just speaks to the kind of dedication and true love of the sport Olympians have. I really admire that. The part about consistency I agree with. Today, I swam a mile (70 lengths in 25 yard pool - 1750 yards) Staring at black line on the bottom of the pool may sound boring to some, but I like having the clock to check my time. I was holding about 1:37 per hundred. When you are swimming so many continuous laps, having the challenge of keeping a steady pace just adds to the fun.

What kind of love brings a pleasure so close to pain?

I competed in a sprint distance triathlon yesterday. Between yesterday's race and the sprint tri I did in May, I've been training for the events since February of this year. I learned alot in the process. One is, that if I'm interested enough in something, I'm able to keep my commitment to it. I did about 4-6 days of training perl week, in general 1 to 1.5 hours per session. The activities were genuinely fun for me. Sure there's a fitness benefit, but at the end of the day, if you aren't having fun doing something, then why keep it up?

While I pushed my physical limits, I don't think I reached them yet. Part of this is that I still fear the physical discomfort of a hard workout. I think the way to get around this is I need to work on my concentration. Its when I'm in pain, my form in the water, bike, and run get sloppy. And that means you slow down. If I can concentrate harder, than at some point I feel I can dis-associate myself from the physical pain I'm putting myself through. (I know this sounds corny, but I'm been thinking about this for a while)

I had been wanting to do a triathlon for a while. I watched the event I did on Sunday last year, and it seemed like so much fun. I hadn't participated in an organized/sanctioned sporting event since high school swim team. The best part of swim team was my fellowship with my teammates. I missed that. And while I did most of my workouts on my own, I met and made some new friends in the process.

I guess doing a triathlon is one of those things that some people want to do once, and then not again. I don't think I'll be one of those. I've had too much fun the past six months. My only regret is, I didn't give it a "tri" earlier.

Stairway to Heaven

After reading this story , I want to try my hand going up the mountain.

Olympic air quality

I'm really looking forward to the Olympics starting next week in Beijing. The two sports that I will be glued to the TV for are swimming (of course) and basketball (USA Basketball has been mediocre at best on the international stage for much of the past decade). But things look a little sketchy to me because the air quality for the Games is , well, a bit up in the air. If I were an athlete competing outdoors - track and field, cycling, marathon - I would be reall nervous. You train your whole life, and the I.0.C. awards the games to a city (and a country) with with an environmental crisis .

Well, the Games are going to get an air quality check by a sport with a recent checkered past of creating its own kind of body pollution when mens' cyclists take a 161 mile tour around Beijing. Many of the participants are just coming off the grueling Tour De France. George Vescey has an interesting article regarding the what he calls cycling's community service act.

Just four days ago, the greatest cyclists in the world were racing up the Champs-Élysées. A week from Saturday, they will be playing the role of the canary in the coal mine, inhaling the formidable mix of oil particles, industrial smoke and Gobi Desert grit in Beijing.

In a form of community service — atonement for cycling’s past sins, perhaps — they will test the air for all their colleagues who plan to breathe outdoors in the next two weeks. The men’s cyclists will take a 161.6-mile toodle around the capital, starting near the Forbidden City, out to the Great Wall, ending up in the Olympic stadium.

If the cyclists start falling off their bikes gasping for air, or their stricken bodies take until Sunday to complete the course, this will be a context clue to the International Olympic Committee that it miscalculated the pollution when it handed the 2008 Games to China seven years ago.

Up to now, the I.O.C. has bleated that nobody could have imagined that China would eliminate oxygen with the same frenzy with which it has eliminated its low-slung urban lanes, or hutong.

Then again, the committee never dreamed the Chinese would block Web sites like Amnesty International’s when it secretly agreed to government control of the Internet in news media centers, as the I.O.C. admitted Wednesday. The committee is looking spineless and dishonest, kowtowing to China that way.

I really, really hope air pollution is not going to affect athletes in Beijing. Otherwise, the I.0.C. is going to look silly for deciding to hold the games in a city notorious for its air pollution. Maybe the brightside of all this, people in China will want to improve their air quality, not just in the weeks leading up the Games, but year-round.