Sharks and Minnows

It's interesting sometimes the connections and leaps that your mind makes when you spend a lot of time alone with your own thoughts. Yesterday's train of thought while driving to work started with Michael, Tracie and Jim Cleek's toddler, and ended with reminiscing about swimming underwater as a type of exercise.

Actually, the sequence started with something before Michael, but I don't recall what it was. I just remember thinking about Michael and the Cleek's visit last Sunday. During that visit I had asked Tracie how Michael's Spanish was doing (his day care provider is Hispanic). One of the things she said in response was that she thinks sometimes when they think Michael is babbling, he's really speaking in Spanish and they just can't understand him. This led to thinking about what Spanish phrases I knew and could say the next time I see them.

That led to thinking about the phrase "Marco Polo", which comes from a game normally played in a swimming pool. I spent lots and lots and lots of time playing Marco Polo as a kid, when I spent all my summers at the pool (which leads to all sorts of separate tangents that I'm not going to go at this time). This led to thinking about the Summer when the big game my gang at the pool played was "Sharks and Minnows".

We took over the deep end of the pool when we played. The pool itself was one big rectangle, and the deep end had a standard springboard in the center of that end of the pool. The game started with the "Shark" (basically the player who was "it" for that game) on the diving board, and the rest of us, the "Minnows", on one side. To start, the shark would run off the end of the board, either jumping or diving in. As soon as the shark hit the water, the rest of us dove in from the side and swam to other side as fast as we could. The shark then tried to get the Minnows, by one of two ways: if the minnow was swimming on the surface, all the shark had to do was touch them; if the minnow was swimming underwater, then the shark had to grab them and bring them to the surface. Once tagged, the minnow became a shark. The minnows who made it safely to the other side would get out of the pool and wait until either every minnow was safe or had been turned into a shark. All the sharks would then line up in the middle of the pool, treading water, the original shark would say go, and all the remaining minnows would dive in and try to get safely back to the other side. This would continue until all minnows had been caught. Whichever minnow the shark had caught first would be the shark at the beginning of the next game.

I was good at this game - very, very, VERY good. Not so much due to my excellent swimming ability (though that helped), as most of the pool gang were good swimmers, too, but because I could hold my breath underwater longer than most. And the more we played this game during that summer, the better I got. The pool was 11 feet deep at the deepest point, and I would take a running start, dive in and streak down to the bottom as I began my swim across. It's very difficult to drag someone up through 11 feet of water who doesn't want to come up. Other kids would try to pull me up, but would have to let go to return to the surface to get a breath, and then come back down to try again -- and would repeat this while I was still down below on my initial breath. By the end of the summer, it usually took quite a few rounds and at least 4 other kids, each going to the surface and back at least once, to tag me. By the end of the summer, the rest of the gang wouldn't play Sharks & Minnows with me unless I agreed to play shark the first game. I can also clearly remember, too, how close I came to blacking out sometimes before I reached the safe side and rose to the surface -- chest spasming to take a breath, and black spots before my eyes. Can you say "competitive"? "stubborn"? nah, not me.....

At the beginning of the school year after that Summer, the main activity in gym class was cross-country running, which was a new sport for the school district. What was amazing that Fall was that I was near the top of my class in running times for the course we ran during gym class. This was highly unusual, as running was not my strong suit. Unfortunately, none of the coaches noticed, as they were still figuring out how cross-country was going to work in the school sports system, and the initial focus was on forming the boys' team, not the girls'. An opportunity missed, that may have changed some things in my life; by the time Spring rolled around, and track season started, the girls that I was beating handily in the Fall on the cross-country course (3 miles, I think) were easily beating me in the track mile run (the longest distance we had in track in our district).

I never had another Summer like that playing Sharks & Minnows, as that was the last one when I was free to play all day - every Summer after that I lifeguarded and/or had other jobs. Never again in school was I able to run the cross-country course like I did that Fall, either. I have always attributed my ability to run distance well that Fall to playing Sharks & Minnows to such extremes all Summer long - stressing my lungs almost to the breaking point over and over again; repeatedly, for weeks, forcing my muscles to work under conditions of oxygen deprivation.

Subsequent reading on the subject indicate that I was probably right: not only did I increase my lung capacity, but I also probably increased my blood's capacity to carry oxygen. But those effects wear off if you don't keep working in those stress conditions, which is why I couldn't run as well the next Spring. Ever since, when I have needed to train heavily for an event (the annual 20.1 mile Longstreet run at Ft Bragg, triathalons, Airborne School...), I have included swimming in my training regimen, where after swimming the requisite laps normally, I would swim several laps underwater. I never quite stressed my lungs as much as during Sharks & Minnows (the motivation to stay under is not the same when you're just swimming by yourself, and staying under until you almost black out is a lot scarier as an adult than when you're a kid), but I think it still helped.