The second individual in human history to walk on water was me, but I didn’t want to make myself important. Not only did I pedestrianize the liquid element, I overtook the predecessor and ran like a greyhound chasing a hare. Escape from competitive swimming.
At that time, at the beginning of the eighties, there were no mobile phones, so no one immortalized the moment, it is also true that the server did not have the propaganda apparatus of Jesus Christ, so powerful that even without images they believed him through faith.
At the age of 12, my faith left me. The swimming one, I mean. It was too hard, it demanded a fierce discipline and a sacrifice that was not given to me when I was born.
Today, after a life in the middle, I chat with Xavier Miralpeix at Sant Jordi, the wonderful indoor Olympic swimming pool in Barcelona’s Eixample. Everyone knows Xavi as Peix because he has been involved in swimming since he was three years old. He was born in 76, do the math. He started in the same pool as me, the Calderón de la Barca de Nou Barris, so it’s easy for me to start the conversation. “I was a bracista and I trained with Sergi López”, I let him go to attract attention. It’s a phrase that never fails me, since Sergi ended up winning bronze at the 1988 Seoul Games, a merit that doesn’t bear comparison with the fact of walking on water, but it’s not bad at all.
Peix trains a group of very good junior swimmers, aged 16 and 17, at Natació Atlètic Barceloneta, a club that ended up absorbing the Atlètic that I knew. I am surprised by the calmness when correcting and addressing the students, since I experienced a swim in which the coaches communicated with the children by screaming like animals, ways that still haunt me in some nightmare today. “Everything has changed a lot, it has become sophisticated”, Miralpeix confesses to me without longing. What has not changed at all is the incomparable harshness of the discipline. I ask him how many hours these creatures spend swimming and experience a mixture of admiration and shudder.
“Every week we do eight sessions. Five in the afternoon and two in the morning, plus Saturday if there is no competition.” “How much distance per session?”, I ask him, even if the answer scares me. “5,000, 6,000, 7,000 meters… It depends on the time of the season.” A mental calculation is beyond me, we are talking about 50 kilometers a week, sometimes more. “When do they train?”, I continue with the questioning. “In the morning from six to eight, in the afternoon two hours from four or seven, it depends on the studies; on Saturdays from half past eight in the morning”. “There are clubs that train more”, he assures me as if it wasn’t for that much either.
( Glups. I remind myself that I’m here to write a summer series for La Vanguardia . I change in the changing rooms. I shower. I put on my cap, glasses, choose a lane for goods like me and do some lengths to make sure that swimming can still be fun. Next to Peix’s kids I move like a snail. I get out of the pool. I’m back with Peix. Training is over. We sit on a bench from from where I watch anonymous people swimming like me).
I think of these teenagers who get up at five in the morning, who enter university or high school together with lazy beings of the same age when they have already crunched six kilometers by swimming. And I wonder what they are made of. Miralpeix tells me that they are made of a special paste (“they spend hours and hours bouncing from wall to wall”, he reminds me without contemplation), and differentiates them from other boys and girls their age. “They tend to get more good grades because no one else has their discipline, their capacity for effort and to organize their time”. They all pursue sporting goals, their bodies speak of the titanic daily effort: their backs are very broad. “I spend more time with them than their parents. I am his tutor, his psychologist and sometimes his son of a bitch. When I detect that their mood needs it, we meet, look at the training and competition calendar and I tell them: you can go to the disco that day. And they go there in groups. Every year they have three weeks of vacation and I recommend that they forget about water. Sometimes they don’t pay attention to me.”
I wonder what a coach has to correct swimmers who do nothing but swim. “Our pending subject is underwater work. Americans, Japanese and Australians give us a big advantage”, the expert tells me. I translate it: after the turn, the competitor has by regulation the first 15 meters before coming to the surface. The Spanish waste them, or rather, they don’t use them enough.
Peix knows this very well. One is faster under than above the water, as long as you don’t know how to walk above it like Our Lord and as a servant, of course. But I didn’t tell Peix that. In any case, praise be to the water. amen
Spain’s first indoor Olympic swimming pool
50 x 21 m
Municipal
