Learning To Swim For Real

Chapter 30: Getting Back In The Groove

"I wish you'd let me call your family," Jack said for about the hundredth time.

Kelsey shook her head resolutely. "Something like this would kill them. There's nothing they can do about it, so why should they know? And my brothers would want to come and beat him up or something."

That sounded pretty good to Jack, actually. Kiki and Ray had left the day before, and Jack felt oddly restless. Other than going to practice every morning, he hadn't stirred from Kelsey's house, and he felt like he should be doing something.

Kelsey had her laptop on her knees, watching video of Marian Lowell doing her Olympic medal winning IM swim. "I still don't get this turn she does," she murmured, writing something down on a pad.

"Yeah, Marian does something really unusual on the back to breast turn," Jack said, distracted from his original topic, as Kelsey had known he would be. "It's called a 'suicide' turn, though a lot of people don't like to call it that. Until she did it at the Olympics, most swimmers thought it was a flashy turn, you know, showy, faster than a regular turn, but not as good as a bucket or a crossover? Not really an elite swimmer's turn? No one had won an international level competition doing one until she did, and everyone watched her climb the ranks, wondering when she was going to switch over to the more standard crossover turn. But she never did, and she kept winning. They're hard to do, you need a lot of lung capacity to be able to do it." He sat next to her, absorbed in the video.

"So that means that, in addition to learning how to do breast stroke, I have to learn this super hard turn named after the worst thing a person can do to herself?" Kelsey asked.

"Yeah, but lucky for you, I'm a breaststroker, so that makes me good at IM, too," Jack explained, settling down, as Kelsey had hoped he would. These days, she found that Jack talking swimming was very comforting, wonderfully calming and soothing. She snuggled into his shoulder a little.

"See, freestyle, backstroke and butterfly especially are power strokes, you really need to be strong, like have powerful muscles," Jack began.

"Right," Kelsey said, eyeing Jack's body. "This is why you're so puny and undersized?"

"Hey, you've seen Zach and Jeff, right?" Jack replied. "Compared to them, I am, you know? I mean, Zach's what? Six foot four? And I think he weighs, like two ten, two fifteen? Jeff's not that big, but he's a big guy, too. I'm six foot nothing, one eighty soaking wet, as they say.

"But anyway," he grinned at her, "breaststroke's different, it's about coordination, and flexibility in your ankles and stuff. My old coach used to say breaststrokers aren't made, they're born. He joked that we fell out of our mothers like this." And he lifted his feet with his toes pointing outward, like a ballet dancer in second position. "And there might be something to that, because my brothers were breaststroke specialists, too, and so was my dad." Jack shrugged, giving Kelsey a whiff of his scent.

"So, usually breaststrokers blow at the other strokes, especially after puberty, for sure after high school, because the swimmers are so big, you know? We just can't keep up. But we're still useful and recruited, because usually the swimmers who can do those other strokes blow at breaststroke. They're just gorillas, huge goons with muscles everywhere and no coordination," Jack concluded, laughing, and Kelsey could tell that this was a breaststroker inside joke.

"And that's what makes us good at the IM, the Individual Medley," Jack went on, clicking on Kelsey's laptop, looking for more video. "Usually on the first lap, the fly, we get a little behind, or, if we have good technique, which I do," he said sounding so adorable it made Kelsey smile a little, "we hold our own.

"Then comes the backstroke," he continued, and from his tone of voice, he might as well have been saying "the part where I'm forced to shovel manure," Kelsey thought in amusement.