I showed up on the pool deck later that afternoon for the first Captain’s Practice, one of the early unofficial workouts organized by the our team captains before the start of the NCAA’s official swimming season. This felt very much like coming home. A tall man with short-cropped red hair introduced himself as “Rocket.” He was our captain and one of just two firsties on the Army Swim Team that year. He was also a sprinter, hence his nickname. Beside him stood Rob and Flip, both cows, whom I knew from my recruiting visit and from the handful of “mass athletics” swimming sessions the team had held during Beast Barracks. Beyond them stood the rest of the team, a handful of their cow classmates and a very small number of yearlings.
I stood with my own classmates while Rob and Flip introduced us to the team, and that’s when I met “Toad,” Army’s incumbent butterflyer.
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| I went home for the first time Columbus Day Weekend. |
Toad was an immediately memorable guy. He stood maybe three inches shorter than me—much shorter than a typical collegiate butterflyer—and had a heavyweight wrestler’s build. He had thick wrestlers’ arms like steel girders along with bulging shoulders and rippling six-pack abs that merely hinted at his seemingly inhuman core body strength. He stood maybe 5’7” but must have weighed fully two hundred pounds. He was not an overly handsome guy, it must be said, owing to his prominent ears and to the red-brown burr of his buzzed crewcut, but I saw at once that he had a big, ready smile. Plus, he had the kind of self-deprecating sense of humor that could see a man happy through four years at West Point despite owning the nickname “Toad”. He was also one of the whitest people I’d ever seen. His skin was so pale that when he worked into a lather, he’d turn bright red from the force of the blood blasting through his body.
Toad smiled when he saw me, and then he welcomed me with literally open arms. “Dan! Man, I’ve heard so much about you!”
It was like embracing a force of nature.
I liked him immediately. We hit the water soon afterwards, and I began to enjoy myself.
I’d found my place. This was where I belonged. I’d not enjoyed Beast Barracks overmuch, but Army Swimming gave me the kind of home I’d been searching for all my life.
Not every day was a heartbreaker at West Point, even during plebe year, but there were enough tough times that my hours at Crandall Pool seemed like paradise by comparison. Even when Academy life made little sense, I still had swimming. The team served as a tie to my past, my primary point of social interaction, and the future that I wanted for myself. This stood in stark contrast to the future that the Academy seemed to want for me everywhere save inside its academic classrooms. So I threw myself into swimming wholesale. Crandall Pool became the one place I felt like I had some measure of control over the course of my own life, and I grabbed at that control with both hands.
We practiced hard for six weeks or so, and then Coach Bosse had us do a few traditional benchmarking exercises. First, he set the pool up long course and had us do a 3000 meter timer. We then set our Cruise Intervals. This required a set of six 100s freestyle, done on less than five seconds rest, leaving on even :05-second interval marks. For me, the set usually started with a :56 or a :58, meaning that I’d then leave on the minute, the next even :05 marked on a standard swimming pace clock. I’d usually put my next 100 under a minute as well and then miss the pace on the third, leaving me with several repetitions around 1:01 or 1:02, and then maybe 1:02 or 1:03 for my final rep. My Cruise Interval would therefore be 1:05. That was the next :05 on the clock. Coach Bosse tended to write workouts in terms of Cruise Interval (CI) plus time as way to set pace and effort. CI + :05 was endurance work. CI + :10 or :15 was more a standard working pace. CI + :20 or more was usually tempo or speed work.
My friend Dave and I set our Cruise Intervals together—and then wound up swimming together for the rest of our Army careers. This built a bond between us that proved unbreakable. Together with a shared love of Metallica and Ozzy Osborne and—eventually—a love of vodka and craft beer as well. We soon became inseparably close, both in the water and out.
Dual meet season started in mid-Fall, and with a reasonably strong performance at Army’s Black and Gold intrasquad meet, I took the lead role in the 200 Butterfly. Toad held me off in the 100, however, and retained the butterfly leg on the team’s primary medley relay. This gave me two roles on the team, essentially the same roles I’d had back in high school. I had to win the 200 Butterfly, and I had to set my relay team, the “B” relay, up to succeed as best I could in the meet’s opening event. This was fine, though I wished I could have contributed a third event. Unfortunately, my sprint freestyle was nowhere near strong enough to score points at the collegiate level, and though Coach Bosse tried me a few times at the 500 Free, I never managed to hold my form in distance races once we started doing serious stroke work later in the season. This lack of versatility bugged me, especially because I could usually hold the pace with the distance swimmers in practice, even with guys like Dave, who seemed to have inhuman levels of aerobic endurance29. Practices aside, however, I never seemed to make use of my would-be potential when it actually counted. By contrast, my friend and classmate Matt could score points in both the butterfly and the individual medley, and in a pinch, he had a decent backstroke, too. I admired his versatility, but I could in no way replicate it.
Still, my role had value. Wins counted for a lot. A first place finish scored nine points in a dual meet, second place scored four, third scored three, fourth two, and fifth one. A win therefore almost always meant a net gain for our team in a given event. If we took first and third, or even first and fourth, we got a substantial boost.
With Mr. Malone’s racing strategy, hard work, and plenty of motivation, dual meet swimming became my best thing. Over the course of those first months, I learned to put together consistent dual meet performances on an ongoing basis, which in turn helped me find a more relaxed, more confident attitude towards racing in general. I knew exactly what to do to get my best possible performance. I would take it out easy and let the other team’s best butterflyer sit on my shoulder, and then I would drop the hammer at the halfway point, just as the other man was starting to feel it. The psychological impact of that move was almost always devastating. The majority of my races were decided by the fifth of seven turns. Toad remained a better sprinter than endurance butterflyer, but he was still usually good for at least third, and with that he, Matt, and I turned the butterfly into one of Army Swimming’s strengths.
After a summer of feeling alternately useless and imbecilic, of wondering if I’d made a horrible mistake in coming to West Point, the sudden reversal of fortunes was indescribably life-affirming. Plebe year offered few chances for glory, but those it did shone brightly indeed.
Army’s dual meet schedule offered a mix of opponents, mostly from the Patriot and Ivy Leagues with teams like UConn or the University of Massachusetts thrown in for variety. We didn’t win every meet, but we did okay. We matched up well against schools like Brown or Dartmouth and with the various Patriot League programs, but we’d struggle against the Ivy League powerhouses, Harvard and Princeton. Still, we were competitive with most of the schools we swam against, even in my personal event, the 200 Butterfly. I was happy with that.
On the Saturdays that we didn’t have meets, we’d have three-hour marathon practices, after which we’d wander up to the football stadium, often taking in a tailgate with my friend Kurt’s parents before standing around with the rest of the Corps while the Army team slugged it out at Michie Stadium. I stood for hours during one early game with Kurt and Dave, wondering aloud if Army was ever going to pass.
“Are you kidding?” Kurt asked, laughing. “Nah, man. They’re not that kind of team.”
“I guess not,” I replied. “I don’t even know what I’m watching down there.”
I’d grown up around die-hard college football fans, but after a lifetime of watching football from the University of Tennessee—“Receiver U”—West Point forced me to relearn the game from the ground up. Army ran the option, and it gave the team a completely different approach than any I’d ever previously seen.
Watching Army Football was both frustrating and joyous in exactly the same way that the Academy itself could be both frustrating and joyous as well. With undersized players, Army often struggled against even moderately good teams. But we won occasional victories, even against those same moderately good teams, and those victories were a wonder to behold.
At Army, it seemed, every victory was a win against the odds.
29. Shortly after our 20th reunion, my teammates and I learned that Dave had actually walked-on to the Army Swim Team. This was much harder to accomplish than you might think. At a school where “every cadet is an athlete,” most coaches were quite strict about who they let onto their teams. At least 90% of cadets had earned a varsity letter in high school. The coaches knew it, so they werevery aggressive about cuts during Beast Barracks’ mass athletics periods.
Dave was from Indiana, which has become a hotbed of swimming in recent decades but which was far from swimming’s heartland back in the 1980s and 90s. Where I arrived at West Point as a near finished product, having swum on a team that routinely put kids into the college ranks, Dave showed up with raw, untapped potential and an unquenchable desire to improve. He worked his way onto the travel roster almost immediately and eventually became a guy who could reliably make the podium at the Patriot League Championships. That’s amazing!
Dave is swimming better than any of us now that we’re in our mid-40s. Unsurprising, really.
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