the first round of an acidosis set meant to train athletes in pain tolerance, Ervin curled up in the pool gutter, groaning, until he vomited. He lay there for a while in a fetal position before slinking off to the showers.
But Bart’s initial disdain began to change when he realized that, despite often bailing on training, Anthony swam in a unique way. It was Coach Bottom who insisted that he closely watch Anthony’s stroke. Soon Bart began to realize that this kid was doing something completely different. “It was all very technical and connected,” Bart recalls. “Eventually we all tried to swim more like Tony.”
Ervin’s idiosyncrasy paradoxically was not so unexpected in the swimming world. Eccentrics are found in every sport, but swimming seems to attract, or create, them in abundance. Maybe it’s a product of the medium—complex, dynamic, unpredictable—or all that chlorine seeping into one’s pores, or the countless hours spent suspended in strenuous exertion, staring in virtual isolation at the pool bottom, lap after lap, like a suburban variation on Chinese water torture. Whatever the reason, swimming has an abundance of characters among both competitors and coaches, and not just among its plebeian ranks: it’s wacky all the way up to the elite crème. In fact, it can even be more idiosyncratic up top since iconoclasm and outside-of-the-box thinking is often what it takes to stand out from the overwashed masses. On the other hand, the regimentation of workouts also generates a culture of intolerance in the swimming world toward those who disrupt that structure. Free spirits are tolerated, but only so long as they’re disciplined and compliant free spirits.
Even traditionalist and by-the-book coaches can sound occult on deck in their use of esoteric terms like threshold speed, VO2 max, negative splitting, and let’s not forget lactate profiles, which to the uninitiated might sound like a pregnancy fetish or something out of Mother, Baby & Child magazine. Of course, there are those coaches and trainers who expand the lingo: there’s USC’s swim coach Dave Salo,13 who published the book SprintSalo: A Cerebral Approach to Training for Peak Swimming Performance, which includes a “SaloSlang Glossary” with drills like PeekSwim, where one swims with closed eyes, taking occasional “peeks” for orientation (this comes with advice to “tell those around you what you are doing and have them watch and protect you”); there’s Milton Nelms whom the Australian press dubbed the “horse whisperer of swimming,” also the creator behind the “Nelmsing Code,” which according to a SwimNews article is a “book of incantation from the holistic school of Brainswimming”; and then there’s Mike Bottom.
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