LEADING EDGE

The two Talbot boys and I are on our usual unpaid Sunday-afternoon shift, fabricating exercise equipment in Ming’s downstairs home office; Hal’s gone home for the weekend. While Jon’s brother and I box and tape finished units for shipping, Jon takes a break and leans back grandly in his dad’s swivel chair to read letters from this week’s in-tray. His feet are up on the desk, and if he found a cigar to puff on he’d be lighting it right now. One letter he begins reading aloud is from John Devitt, the Rome Olympic 100-metre freestyle champion. It sounds too polite, almost fawning, to my discerning ears, and goes, ‘Hi coach, trust you and yours are well. It seems you haven’t got that writing arm out of plaster yet.’

Jon chuckles at this last comment, ‘Dad hardly ever writes back.’ And now he resumes reading because he’s clearly proud that old legends think his father’s still worth the odd line, a reminder he was actually named after Devitt. (Or was it Konrads? No — make that Henricks, because I’m sure he’s the only three-letter Jon of this illustrious trio.) As he reads, I tune in and out while leafing through a surprisingly spiffy brochure I’ve pulled from the same tray. It’s from Indiana University, where the famous ‘Doc’ Counsilman trains Mark Spitz, who won some medals in Mexico and is tipped for far bigger things in Munich.

The booklet’s frontispiece declares that Counsilman’s made a stunning breakthrough in describing how swimmers generate propulsive forces underwater. With the help of his university’s fluid-mechanics boffins and photography department, he filmed hours of underwater footage of freestyle arms pulling in darkened pools, with luminous bands on wrists to graphically trace patterns. In the booklet, photos show those pulling sequences like glow-worm blips in the black. What Counsilman discovered was that champions don’t pull in straight lines, as once supposed, but in ‘sequenced sweeps’ and ‘elliptical patterns’ — an undulating continuum of multi-planar slices. All this fancy movement is dictated by three things: the laws of fluid mechanics, the complex interaction of the arm–shoulder system, and a swimmer’s natural proprioceptive talent (neuro-sensory feedback that helps swimmers respond powerfully and accurately to their body’s motion). Counsilman claims the hand acts as a foil, like the leading edge of a plane wing, as it generates ‘lift forces’ through changing direction, pitch, and accelerative bursts. But this is all a little confusing because I can’t see how the shape of a hand has any ‘leading edge’ like the rounded top profile of a wing, unless you count the crude offset bulge of the thumb muscle — and that’s a stretch. I glance down at my own hand and see only a slab of wrinkled meat with one end shredded into banded sausages. And anyway, the leading edge of a plane wing is a passive, fixed structure, while a swimmer’s hand is active. But what is crystal clear and absolutely hilarious to me is when Counsilman claims good swimmers have always instinctively pulled this way, even with coaches barking at them to pull in straight lines. Seemingly to excuse these past errors of his profession, he insists those coaches could never accurately observe underwater movements from above anyway, due to the water’s choppiness and refractive error. (Then why did they advocate straight pulling? I wonder.) But at least he seems happy to admit past champions succeeded despite their coaching, not because of it. Maybe we’re still doing that.

For several days I wait keenly for Talbot to announce Counsilman’s radical findings, since time is surely of the essence and the brochure’s already been in his in-tray a week; he must be itching to tell us. But a week later when there still have been no meetings, no revelations, I start my own experiments by waving my hands this way and that, lap after lap, making my arms even more tired than usual. But instead of going faster, I’m slower. I’m so slow, even by my worst standards — it now takes twice as long to pull my arm through — that Talbot boots me over to the junior lanes again. There’s always a two-day wait with the little kids before he’ll even consider my return, as if to show that you don’t stuff around with Donny and come swanning straight back. But being back in the shame lanes gives me more time to experiment. There must be some secret to unlock in these crazy curves I’m doing, though my eyes have at least been opened to the fact that my arms already had their own sweeps, like Counsilman said. My native curves seem most dynamic after halfway, though to my surprise I’ve also discovered my left hand goes limp near the finish, sort of crumples up before pulling out short. It’s obvious that if the hand is limp, not even the most rigorous sweeps can be transmitted as force: fairy-floss could shift more water! I decide, finally, to abandon my oversized Zorro zig-zags under Counsilman’s channelled mentorship, and concentrate instead on keeping my wussy left hand flat and firm to the end.

By the time I’m back in the top lane, my left tricep has been throbbing non-stop for twenty-four hours from repeatedly sweeping back with a firm hand until it extends well past my togs on exit. But I don’t let up, the jolting pain proof I’ve given things a big shake-up. Even a week later the tricep is tender from all those buckets of extra water I’ve been throwing down my leg, though nothing like the first few days’ ordeal. The difference now is that my hand has done it so many thousands of times that it’s no longer a conscious effort.

For the first time in my career, stroking with fully functioning equipment, I begin staying with Windeatt through entire training sets. In the third week of the school holidays, I beat him in an 800-metre race, going within a few seconds of his world mark from the Combined High Schools titles. A week later I beat him by half the pool in a 1500-metre race at Birrong when I massacre thirty seconds off my best time. He hasn’t even come within a body-length of me in several 400-metre freestyle trials we’ve raced in training. (He still kills me in the one-lap sprints Talbot occasionally dishes out after training, but those sprinting arms are useless after the first lap of a race anyway.) Although I’m a little disappointed all this new power hasn’t come directly from my Counsilman sleuthing, I’m still indebted for the intense scrutiny his theory prompted. If I’ve bridged the gap with Windeatt after just a few weeks of my renovated freestyle, just imagine where I’ll be by the time we’re back at school. I’ve made it! I repeat over and over in my head.

One night after training a month later, lying about in the settling water of my lane, I overhear a candid discussion between Talbot and Windeatt at the wall. Don’t they know I’m here? Talbot’s voice is alternately consoling, then raspy and carping. It seems he’s telling Graham how past champions did it, mistakes they corrected and qualities that got them through — that sort of guff. ‘You know, Graham,’ he coos through the wall and gutter slaps, crouching closer, ‘even champions try only as hard as required for success, or whatever passes for success at the time, and within a few years their records can look shabby. You following?’ Windeatt nods obediently before Talbot strikes an upward note. ‘What I’m actually saying, Graham, is that every swimmer is keeping something in reserve. Always! Even you.’

Well hello, I’m thinking — what had he thought champions did? I mean, if you’re lucky enough to draw an empty chamber at Russian roulette, you’re hardly going to risk another turn just to call yourself the two-chamber champ. And of course new generations of swimmers will come along and trounce a champion’s times. They’re from a much bigger town called the future, for goodness sake, with fresh talent and the momentum of chasing those ever-receding marks from their first races.

Is that all they’ve got? I ask myself: just some platitude about champions not wanting to kill themselves if they can possibly help it? Now they glance across as if they’re listening back; I’ve come too close. I nod, smile, and jump out.

A month into the new school year, it seems Windeatt’s struggling with his health. One week it’s sinuses; the next, a trace-element deficiency. And now it could be simple fatigue; nobody knows for sure. What is clear is that his father has turned up twice recently with a sheet of blood stats, which he and Talbot pored over for minutes at a time. They’re thinking there has to be some explanation for Graham’s recent lack of improvement, for someone like me — a backstroker from Queensland — beating him. I like his dad. He never lurks in a tracksuit like some of the others, just to chew the fat over their kids going up and back. Mr Windeatt’s only here if it’s important, and otherwise prefers to let Talbot get on with his job. He’s the manager of some big hardware store in town — Nock and Kirby’s rings a bell — and gets along with a rolling limp some kids say is from childhood polio.

Today Windeatt gives us all a laugh when he jumps in the pool and quips that the only deficiency found in his latest test is chlorine. I didn’t even know chlorine was meant to be in our blood, despite our skins soaking in it for five hours a day. Maybe he means chloride — I think that’s a kind of trace element — or perhaps his sinus blockage confused the two sounds. Anyway, everyone thinks it’s a scream that his blood’s lacking the very substance we’re pickled in for a third of our waking hours.