Body Lengths

by Leisel Jones

  ‘You want to win? Then you have to train. It’s that simple,’ she says to me. ‘This is your decision to swim. You are choosing to do this. I’m not making your decisions for you. It’s you who’ll have to wear the consequences.’

  When it comes time to compete in carnivals at the weekend, there is no point complaining to Mum if I haven’t trained properly during the week and I lose. Mum makes it perfectly clear that if I want to win, I have to work hard. And because winning is so important to me, she teaches me that training should be important too. She helps me appreciate that there is a trade-off and she teaches me how to use this to motivate myself to work hard.

  Mum backs my swimming, since it is what I choose to do. But beyond that, it’s all me. Because I am such a driven kid, and because I like winning so very much, I don’t need Mum to force me to train. I don’t need anyone to wave a big stick: I am happy to wield my own stick (or besser brick, as the case may be). Even at 5 a.m. on those cool, dark winter mornings in Queensland, when the temperature sometimes dips into single figures – even then I don’t need anyone else to push me. I can do it myself. If I want to win, I know what I have to do. And I want to win so damn much.

  The other thing I want – almost as much as winning – is boys. I love boys. I love them a lot. Boys, boys, boys. And Burpengary provides them by the pool-load.

  I meet my first boyfriend at the club when I am twelve. His name is Josh Bettridge. And like so many other Queensland boys, he is cute and tanned and blond and sporty. I race against his older brother, Ben, who is fifteen, but it is Josh I like. Josh is slower than me and he can’t get away. My first kiss is with Josh, down behind the pool shed on a muggy summer evening after training, when the sky screams with cicadas. It’s Josh who gives me my first Valentine’s Day rose. I hide it under my bed, until it starts to rot and my mum finds it and laughs – and I die of embarrassment.

  It’s fitting that my first boyfriend is a swimmer. And it’s fitting that I have a boyfriend at twelve. I am the first of my friends with a boyfriend, the first to be kissed: I am an early achiever at everything.

  I love being part of the Burpengary Swimming Club, with Josh and Col and the besser bricks and the blackboard with our times scrawled on it, with Friday night racing and barbecues and everyone knowing everyone else’s times. We’re a country club. A family. Travel ten kilometres away and no-one has heard of us, but we don’t care. We’re mad about swimming and we support each other and we’re proud of our pool in Col’s backyard. Burpengary is where I learn to swim without floaties and where I meet some of my first friends. It’s where I begin my love affair with swimming.

  In years to come, I will find myself thinking back to Burpengary, trying to recall what I ever liked about the sport.

  3

  The Big Dawgs

  When I am thirteen the most terrifying thing I can think of is Sarah Bowd. Sarah swims for Redcliffe Leagues Swimming Club, which is part of the broader Sunshine Coast region in which I compete. Although she’s shorter than me, Sarah is a few months older and she’s curvy, confident and achingly cool. She’s also a winner. Sarah wins everything. This girl only has to look at a pool to break a record. She’s the best breaststroker in the state. She’s the best everything in the state. Any distance, any stroke: you can bet your togs Sarah Bowd will win it. And because we’re in the same age category, I find myself lined up on the blocks next to Sarah all the bloody time.

  Redcliffe Leagues is the big brother club to our little Burpengary. It’s only thirty minutes down the road from us, so it’s our closest neighbour but our biggest rival. They boast some big names at Redcliffe: Geoff Huegill, Tarnee White, Rebecca Creedy and Sarah Bowd. These names are not yet synonymous with Olympic glory, but they will be, in the not-too-distant future.

  Ken Wood is the coach at Redcliffe and he’s one of the best swimming coaches going. He’s been training Sarah since she was eight, along with her older brother, Martin. Martin Bowd is several years ahead of us and he’s the ringleader among all the swimmers at Redcliffe. See? What did I tell you? Sarah Bowd is cool just by association. She’s so cool it’s almost funny. Almost.

  At Redcliffe they all wear this red t-shirt with a picture of a bulldog on it. The bulldog is sitting on the front porch of a house, glaring menacingly at passers-by, and the caption underneath reads: ‘If you can’t run with the big dawgs, then stay under the porch.’ I am terrified of those t-shirts, just like I am terrified of Sarah Bowd. Sarah is a big dawg, there’s no doubt about that. Whereas I’m more of a chihuahua. Or a miniature poodle. I am skinny and have mousey -brown hair. I am average and shy and I come from Burpengary. I am not like funny, self-assured, strikingly pretty Sarah Bowd. The mere sight of Sarah in her ‘big dawgs’ t-shirt is enough to make me want to run and hide under the porch.

  But one day Mum and I have a meeting with Ken Wood. Ken’s watched me race, he’s seen my stroke and he’s identified what he thinks might be potential there. Do I want to come for a trial at Redcliffe? I glance nervously at Mum. Redcliffe? Me? I’m not sure I can see myself in one of those t-shirts.

  But Ken is keen. ‘There’s no qualifying time needed or anything,’ he assures us. ‘I’ve seen you compete and I think you’re good enough to join our squad. It’s that simple.’

  Ken has seen a spark in me. He’s confident I can cut it with the big dawgs. So when I am thirteen, and after more than a decade at my old club, I leave Burpengary for the big smoke of Redcliffe Leagues SC.

  It’s really hard to leave my old club and my coach of eleven years. Col (with his besser brick) has been instrumental in my swimming so far. Col built me. But if I stay at Burpengary I will probably get bored eventually and quit. Col knows this, so he’s understanding when I tell him I am leaving. He knows I’ve reached my limit in his 25-metre pool. There’s only so many tumble turns a kid can do.

  The pool at Redcliffe, by contrast, is a shimmering blue oasis that stretches for a full 50 metres. It’s a stone’s throw from the maze of canals that flow from the sparkling waters of Deception Bay, just south of Bribie Island. As the sun comes up over the water during training each morning, it looks like a tourism ad for the Sunshine State. It’s a far cry from the shed and the Hills Hoist in Col’s backyard.

  It turns out that’s not the only thing that’s different from Col’s.

  First there is Ken Wood’s long list of rules to be obeyed if you want to swim at Redcliffe. Fine, I think to myself. I can do rules. But then I learn that Rule 1 is ‘No parents on the pool deck’. No parents. On the pool deck. Gulp. I have to leave my mum at the door. This might not sound like such a big deal, but for a shy kid from Burpengary – a shy kid whose mum has been there for every training session, whose mum never misses a Friday night club night, never skips a carnival – for that kid, Rule 1 is a very big deal. And as our car winds its way south from Caboolture to Redcliffe, circumnavigating the arse end of Deception Bay, I wonder if I’m deceiving myself. Who am I kidding? Why did I think I might belong at Redcliffe?

  But when Mum drops me at the front entrance, I shove down the butterflies in my stomach, shoulder my swimming bag, and walk doggedly through the gate. It’s time to put on my big girl pants. Out on the pool deck, Ken is already barking instructions from beneath his short, black toothbrush moustache. I walk up to him, drag my eyes from the concrete deck and, with all the courage I can muster, announce, ‘I’m here to train.’

  And train I do. The training at Redcliffe is a big step up for a little kid from a country club. To start with, I increase my training from seven or eight sessions per week to ten. I’m now hauling my arse out of bed for a 4.30 a.m. start every day before school, and fronting up on Saturday mornings too. And when we train, we train hard. We regularly swim between seven and ten kilometres per training session – and they’re often twice a day. We do 100 × 100s (one hundred times 100 metres, or two hundred laps of an Olympic pool), which seems excessive for a thirteen-year-old 100-metre swimmer. Then, after we’ve swum the bes
t part of ten kilometres, we drag ourselves out of the pool for an hour-long weights session in the gym, where I lift up to 80 kilograms on the leg press. After this we shower, change and head to school for the day, before coming back and doing it all over again in the afternoon. Seriously, there are times when I feel like I might die of exhaustion.

  Some of the boys in our squad are doing things as extreme as 1500-metre butterfly with weights or in drag suits, or even sometimes with their running shoes on. That’s another thing they do here at Redcliffe: swim in shoes. For weeks before I start at Redcliffe, whenever I tell people that I am switching clubs, they delight in telling me how Ken Wood makes his kids swim with their runners on. For kilometre after leg-aching, back-breaking kilometre, his squads purportedly plough up and down the pool with their running shoes laced on. Some people claim to have seen all the shoes lined up on the roof after training so they can dry out in the baking Queensland sunshine, before they are retrieved and laced on again in time for afternoon training. In the weeks leading up to my start at Redcliffe, I can’t look at a pair of running shoes without my stomach doing flip-flops.

  And now I know it’s true: we do swim with our runners on.

  Training under Ken Wood is a massive wake-up call for me. So I do the only thing I can think of: I suck it up, princess, and get on with the job. This is serious work but I want to do it. Each morning at training, after we winch the covers off the pool, I join the end of the line and jump in the pool and hope to hell that I can keep up. The fear that I’m not going to make it, that today will be the day I get kicked out, is constant. It’s unrelenting.

  When I start at Ken’s, I’m not as fast as the others. Nowhere near. They are terrifyingly good, these kids. They’re Olympians in the making. They’ve all been with Ken for years, and boy does it show. They’ve done the hard work: they know the drills. And even though the Sydney 2000 Olympics are more than twelve months away, many of them are already household names. They’re superstars: heroes. And they’re ploughing up and down in the same lane as me. I pump my skinny limbs and try to keep up.

  I put my head down and the improvements I see are rapid and satisfying. I enjoy the hard work, the discipline. I feel like I will get somewhere if I can just work hard enough. I am daunted, sure. I’m more terrified than I have been in my whole life. But one thing I am not afraid of is hard work, and that’s what’s required here. Each day I get in the water and get on with the job. Whatever Ken throws at me, whatever drill he dreams up, I do it. Even if it nearly kills me.

  Then one day I reach out to take a stroke and instead I hit … feet? I have caught up with the person in front. After all my hard work, after weeks of self-doubt, I have earned my place. Finally, I am running with the big dawgs.

  Of course, running with the pack is not the same as being accepted. Just because I can keep up doesn’t mean I fit in. I spend a lot of my time at Redcliffe trying to be cool enough to fit in. The swimming club is attached to Redcliffe Leagues Club, next door, home of many State of Origin greats. It’s also attached to Southern Cross College, the local Catholic high school, where Ken is the swimming coach. Most of the swimmers at Redcliffe go to school together at Southern Cross. Others, such as Tarnee White, have recently graduated.

  When I meet Tarnee, Sarah Bowd is forgotten in an instant.

  Tarnee White is my new breaststroke rival. She’s four years older than me and three or four seconds ahead in the pool. And in swimming, these seconds are light years. As she and I stand shivering on the pool deck together each morning, listening to Ken issuing drills, the differences between us couldn’t be more obvious. Tarnee is tall, skinny and beautiful, and she has these bouncing golden curls that tumble down her back. It’s like trying to compete with Goldilocks. Ken loves Tarnee. She is clearly his favourite: his golden child with her golden curls, destined to win – you guessed it – Olympic gold.

  For my part, I desperately want Tarnee to like me; I’d do anything to be her friend. But for my first few months at Redcliffe I am simply too terrified to talk to her. She is so amazing and so intimidating that the thought of walking up to her and actually opening my mouth feels more impossible than any drill Ken can dream up. Instead, I remain in quiet awe. I drop my gaze reverentially whenever she walks past, and I remain a respectful distance behind her in the pool.

  But after a while something strange happens: I start to beat her.

  It goes like this. After I’ve been at Redcliffe for a few months, we decide that I should leave Tullawong High, in Caboolture, and switch to Southern Cross College. My training is going well under Ken and by moving to Southern Cross I can be part of his swimming program during school hours, too. The other bonus of Southern Cross is that it’s next door to the Redcliffe pool. This means that after training each morning I only have to walk a couple of hundred metres across the asphalt and I’m at school. Mum, in particular, is a fan of this plan. She’ll still have to leave the house at 4 a.m. to drive me to the pool, but instead of having to hang around waiting for me to finish and then driving me back to school, she can drop me off and go straight back home and back to bed for an hour or so before work. Other parents, like my friend Tanya McDonald’s mum, sleep on the backseats of their cars while they wait for their kids to finish training. There are some mornings, trust me, when I would like to join them.

  So when I am halfway through Year 9, I move to Southern Cross Catholic College and I start training with Ken during school hours, as well as before and after school. I immediately start to swim better. A lot better, apparently, because I start to beat Tarnee. Up until now, Tarnee has been far and away the best breaststroker there is. So you can imagine she’s a little aggrieved when – less than twelve months out from the Sydney Olympics – this little upstart begins to beat her. An upstart trained by her own coach, no less. Fair enough, too. I’m four years younger than her – and I’d be pretty peeved if I was beaten by a nine-year-old. It’s not long before I get Tarnee offside. She calls me a ‘brown-noser’ at training because I swim up her arse.

  But if Tarnee is struggling with it, well, so am I. For months now, all I have wanted is for this girl to like me, so I wage an internal battle with myself: do I let her win and keep her (and Ken) sweet? Or do I swim my own race and not worry about being her friend? In my thirteen-year-old brain there is no way to do both, and I circle endlessly between the two options in a hopeless holding pattern: I don’t want to beat Tarnee, because I want her to like me. But I can’t let her win, because I’m not built that way. Plus, I worry about the fact that Tarnee is Ken’s favourite. Am I doing myself any favours by beating this girl? I wonder.

  In the end there’s no choice. It kills me to beat Tarnee. But it kills me more to lose. So I swim my guts out and I savour my wins. I realise that as long as we are competing, Tarnee and I will never truly be friends – she is not that sort of person. We will be friendly rivals, but always rivals. I choose winning over our friendship.

  When I started at Redcliffe I never dreamt I would keep up with these girls. With Tarnee White or Sarah Bowd. And now here I am, leading the pack. Things are really starting to happen for me under Ken. Big things, exciting things. I am running with the biggest dawgs I know.

  But I never do get one of those t-shirts: they’d stopped printing them by the time I joined the club.

  4

  This Baby’s Going to the Olympics

  My stroke is all wrong. Shortly after I move to Southern Cross and start training with Ken in earnest, he points out that I’m in need of some pretty severe stroke correction. So he sets about making some changes. Big ones. Ken is fundamental in making my stroke what it will become. But one of the things he doesn’t change is the way I hold my hands.

  Technically, when you do breaststroke your hands are supposed to be face down so that your palms kiss the water, not the sky. By pressing downwards you lift yourself higher, just as you do when performing a push-up on land. But my hands face upwards. I push the water upwards rather than push it down,
and as a result I force my body down deeper into the water. I don’t know why I do this; I just always have. For me it’s more natural, more fluid: as intuitive as dancing.

  People are already telling me that I’m not supposed to swim like this, that I’m doing it all wrong. But Ken is more open-minded.

  ‘Is it working for you?’ he asks me poolside one morning as the sun is just beginning to streak the sky.

  I nod.

  ‘Then there’s your answer.’

  My hands are never discussed again.

  Ken is all about embracing what comes naturally, about seizing natural advantage. If holding my palms upwards works for me, why change it? Who cares if it’s ‘not right’ according to someone else’s rules? Ken assures me it’s okay by him, and at the same time he teaches me something bigger than stroke correction. I learn not to emulate other people. ‘Always be a first-rate version of yourself,’ Ken tells me, quoting Judy Garland, ‘not a second-rate version of someone else.’ Ken loves this quote. His other favourite is: ‘Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down.’ This one is William Mizner. I file it away for future reference.

  The other thing about my stroke is that I sit very low in the water. A lot of breaststrokers in the 1990s are swimming really high, bobbing high and fast and furious alongside me. My stroke is much slower and much smoother and more streamlined than others’ and I spend a lot of my race time underwater. ‘Flowy’ is often how I hear myself described. Flowy. I like that. I like to think I am somehow at one with the water.

  At one.

  On my own.

  But that means I’m different. And different is controversial.

  My slower, smoother stroke means that most of my competitors have a higher stroke rate than me. So not only are they higher in the water than me – and, therefore, much more visible – but when they are seen, they are seen to be fast. While I am swimming at a rate of forty-two strokes per minute, everyone else around me is doing forty-eight or even fifty. They’re swimming high and working hard. It’s energetic, powerful stuff.