swimmed swammed swummed

Found this boulder in the middle of the Umpqua River; glad I
didn't find it with my nose …

Vacation leftovers:

• Overwhelming thought: Homeward bound on my 5,000-meter race up in the Cascades a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't outswim the thought of how they do it … how all those swimmers can swim 20-plus miles across the daunting English Channel ('tis the season), the Catalina Channel, Lake Tahoe, or even a 10k race. I'm drained completing three miles.

• Retroactively thunk thought: Haley Anderson from Granite Bay (just a 20-minute drive from where I live) won the silver medal in the 10k race at the London Olympics. She finished the 6.2-mile open water swim just four-tenths of a second (!) behind the Hungarian gold medalist, Eva Risztov. Over the final 1,000 meters, the 20-year old swimmer churned from fourth to fractions of a second behind the winner. Anderson swam the race in one hour, 57 minutes, 38 and six-tenths seconds. That is still faster than I managed to swim half that distance up in the Cascades. I wonder if she'd join our ragtag swim group out on Lake Natoma.

Haley's older sister Alyssa shared a gold in the women's 4 by 200 freestyle relay at the London Olympics. Two Olympic medalists from one games, from one family. What're the odds? Alyssa can swim with us too, I guess.

• Canoe!: Canoes outnumber kayaks 10 to one atop cars in mountainous central Oregon (quite the opposite in my neighborhood). Though I like kayaks, I love canoes. It's tradition for our family (well, me, and sometimes my wife) to blurt "Canoe!" at the sight of one atop of a vehicle, the same way someone might say "Puppy!" (And Rat, according to Stephan Pastis' "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip, defines tradition as "a reason for doing something you can no longer think of a reason for doing.")

A canoe contains romance for me, and since I declare myself fairly accomplished at steering one, I yearn for quiet waters to rove on early mornings. My one material longing would be for an 18-foot Kevlar™®© or carbon fiber canoe, luggable by one person, with which to wander backwaters so deep the mosquitoes could airlift me back to my car.

I long for such a canoe the way some might crave a wristwatch that tells time at 20,000 times the price of a Timex™and is only recognizable by others wearing similar watches … I'm sorry: Timepieces.

•  Stay out of my summer!: C'mon, NFL, your meaningless preseason games have taken over the sports media. Your games, a week hence, are listed in the broadcast schedule in my paper above today's baseball games, and Major League Baseball is fighting down the home stretch, with the Giants, my favorite team, at first place in its division, the drama intense. Baseball stays out of football's way, for the most part. Why can't football go dark for another month or so? I know this happens every year, but it's on my last nerve this year.
 
• Shows what I know: Someone please enlighten me: How did central and eastern Europe come to dominate men's water polo? It's not the sport I'd imagine that part of the world to champion, but I'm picayune and too narrow minded. Croatia won the gold, Serbia the bronze. Croatia, Serbia and Hungary destroyed the U.S. men's team, the golden boys of swimming pools and SoCal beaches (again, picayune pea brain, that's me), made 'em look like they had just picked up the game the week before. What's the evolution of water polo in Europe?

• Shows what I know, II: Team handball would wear me out, surely, but there's something off about it. Is it the progenitor for all similar sports? Did someone playing it say, "This is fun and all, but if you really want a challenge, we should try to play without using our hands (soccer), or move the ball with sticks (hockey), heck strap on some skates (ice hockey) and make it really interesting. Did Dr. Naismith decide, "Let's shrink the goal to a tiny hoop and require players who wanted to keep the ball had to bounce it all the time?" Someone else must have said, "If you really want a challenge, let's do this in the water," and gave birth to water polo.

Having come late to team handball (and seriously doubting I'll see it again until four years hence) I'm reminded of finally seeing "High Noon," the seminal man-alone-against-the-world Gary Cooper western, and thinking it hokey because I grew up on a steady diet of Gunsmoke, Bonanza and every other movie and show turned original movie moments into clichés.

• Crass act: Why do athletes pretend to bite their medals? Whether this gesture derives from fact or Dickensian fiction, it's meant to show how people might tell if their gain is real gold, since the soft metal would show teeth marks; it implies the giver might have cheated recipients. Though the geasture might have lost its historical meaning, and athletes and photographers think it may be cute, it's rude to receive such a high honor, one of a kind, crafted to celebrate athletic achievement, and put it in your mouth. We get a two-year reprieve from seeing that.

• Fish, meet pond: Time was I swam in pools only because I knew no other. Now I'm in lakes most of the time and in a pool almost never. Stopping over in Eugene where our daughter goes to school, I ran out of swim choices except for a pool, within walking distance. The online schedule listed open times and prices, but did not specify that two separate swim teams would be going through their paces during lap swim and using all lanes. Lanes were marked "slow" "medium" and "fast" and I had no idea what the teams really meant by that. Finding a man alone in a lane, I got permission to swim with him, but he swam in circle within the lane, rather than up and down one side, so I would have had to look for him constantly throughout my swim because I didn't know how fast he swam and whether he would swim up against me. Plus, the pool water wasn't all that clear, and the high water temperature in the cool morning left the surface in a foam of mist, so I couldn't see much. I was out in 10 minutes. Keep your pool; give me the open water any time.

• Back home: It's a big change from 4,893 feet above sea level, to 128 feet above. Lake Natoma is so much easier to swim in, unlike the mountain lakes on our vacation. Not easy; it's never easy for me. But it feels so much better.

Best logo ever (for three weeks, anyway) We're-Making-the-Stuff-So-We-Can-Put-Whatever-We-Want-on-it Olympics Merchandise division

An Olympics contrarian, I might as well go all the way and say I like Nike's Team USA logo designed for the basketball and track team uniforms, made from recycled plastic bottles.

Many hate the logo.

Google "Nike USA logo," and the first result you'll find is from a yahoo.com sports blog: "Nike's Team USA basketball logo is hideous."

Too much emphasis on the S, says the blogger, because no one calls it the United STATES of America. Too much like a superhero emblem, says another critic.

Though I wonder idly why U.S. athletes don't have a more, you know, uniform look, I won't go as far as a Fox News, which declared the U.S. women's gymnastics team's fuchsia leotards unpatriotic.

Crown me king of U.S. Olympics, and I'd impose this logo on the uniforms … mainly because its power snuck up on me.

Especially the alternate usages, one with the "u" and "a" upturned like wings (and framing pectoral muscles), the other with "u" and "a" swept down like a chevron. The larger symmetrical "s" creates an anchor and point for each unified V shape. The angles of the letterforms align to create a typographic unit.

The whole logo buzzes slightly like an Escherian optical illusion, looking, every millisecond or so, three-dimensional, pushing in, pulling out, across the chest.

Simple and clever. I don't care what the critics say: That I've got too much spare time on my hands.

Yeah, it looks like a superhero emblem. For this instance I say, so what?

Had I truly time to waste, I'd wonder what's with all the bright yellow Nike track shoes.

Swim swam swum

Random unsubstantiated observations (to accompany randomly placed art):

• The end of the end: The thought hit my wife and me simultaneously Saturday, as we left the rest area below Donner Lake, where I had just finished a swimming race (or vice versa): Our vacation was officially over.

• Too good to be true: Bend, Oregon, is the city Disney™®© would have designed, could it find a way to package the place for 21st century mass consumption. All it lacks are admissions gates, which the Mickey Mouse media oligarchy could probably manage without trouble since drivers so dutifully drop their speed as they enter the city of 80,000 and change.

This small city straddling the great high desert and the edge of the Cascade Range has reclaimed itself. Once a timber town, anchored by lumber mills, now it exudes and exhorts tourism —  especially for the young and vigorous. Developers rescued two massive sawmills, keeping three soaring smokestacks and the shells of buildings, and turning them all into high-end shops and restaurants, and adding an amphitheater named for tire king Les Schwab (Bend homie) all under the name Old Mill District. Suck eggs, Sacramento, trying and failing so far to do the same with its railyards.

Bend has 15 craft breweries, three more around the region, and more to come. Look out, Portland.

Families float down the lazy Deschutes River in inner tubes and brand new chaise lounge rafty apparatuses right past the Old Mill District and into an immaculate old storybook neighborhood of lumber barons' manors.

Clean and cool logo!

We had to retrieve enough forgotten camping items in Bend to evolve from thoroughly annoyed to partially pleased at the myriad carefully landscaped and sculptured roundabouts in the western, mostly frivolous side of Bend. I wonder at the planning involved in building so many of them (a local called them keyholes); I mean, you can't have a business at any of the corners, because drivers wouldn't be able to turn out in time to reach it. Either a lot of corner properties had to be condemned and ripped out to make way for the roundabouts, or the roundabouts came first and the useless part of the city was build around it.

The utilitarian part of Bend (you know, with grocery shops, gas stations, drug stores) is beset with many lethargic traffic lights, mostly to temper any enthusiasm drivers might retain for the never-say-stop roundabouts.

The place smelled sharply like sweat when I was a kid — a permeating blend of incinerator smoke and pine and sawdust and plywood glue. Now it smells like money. 

• I came, I swam, I was conquered: The excuse for vacation was a swim festival west of Bend at tidy little Elk Lake in the Deschutes National Forest, the South Sister mountain towering above. A friendly coalition of U.S. Masters swimming groups (Central Oregon Masters Aquatics, or COMA) sponsors three days of races, and they make out-of-town swimmers welcome. We just had to be part of it, even if — especially if — we didn't know what we were getting into.

At each lakeside campground on the northbound trip, I managed a swim and quickly huffed and puffed each time, barely able to finish what is relatively easy for me back home. The altitude was robbing me of strength and air, or I was just mired in one of those struggly periods I get into.

No sooner had we finally settled into a campsite at Elk Lake than I joined the 3,000-meter race on a Friday evening. Altitude and anxiety and wind and chop and a misguided attempt to talk myself out of giving up had me give up before I reached the first buoy, out of breath. The race director told me to try again in the next races and take it slow, since I come from 121 feet in altitude, and Elk Lake is 4,893 feet.

Skipping the 500-meter race the next day, I finished the 1,500 meters and felt OK, then Sunday slogged through the 5,000-meter race (about three miles) and labored through the end of the 1,000- meter race to end the festival.

Stopping frequently in the 5,000, I looked back on the course to discover the course had disappeared. With a quick glance to my left, I saw why: The rescue boat was already pulling the marker buoys, a rather blunt message that I was the last one on the course.

I stumbled through the finish line, the beneficiary of the swim festival tradition — loudly cheering on the last swimmer.

• Iron Eyes Cody, we need you! The candy bar wrappers and sunburned cans of Oly tossed on the side of road of my generation have given way to flattened empty packets of Gu™®© along Century Avenue, the 100-mile mountain highway loop leading out of Bend. This is a place for serious bikers (the swimming event we went to encouraged volunteers to bicycle the 32 miles and 1,000 foot climb from Bend rather than fatten their carbon footprint).

• Lost a part and found an inspiration: An elderly man joined me on the Elk Lake beach one morning in my search for the tiny cap that holds the air in my goofy looking inflatable orange swimmer's safety device. He isn't just any elderly man, and he's far, far from elderly. He's David Radcliff, 78, a retired high school teacher and administrator from Southern California, and now a master's swimmer living near Portland. What he didn't say — what I found out from others — is that he swam the 1,500 meter freestyle race in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. After taking 38 years off from swimming, he resumed in 1995 and now owns a multitude of world records for his age group.

At the swim festival at Elk Lake, Dave Radcliff swam the 1,500-meter race in 25 minutes and 11 seconds, 36th among all swimmers. In 1956, finishing fourth in his heat and unable to advance to the finals, he swam it in 19:09.6. I swam the 1,500 at Elk Lake in 32 minutes and 49 seconds, 104th overall.

(I need to discard the delusion that I'll improve by attrition, more likely to place in my age group the older I get: The 1,500 winner, at 20 minutes and 35 seconds, is 60 years old.)

Friendly and encouraging, Dave often asked how I was faring at the festival and reminded me to take the races slow and easy to account for the altitude. I took his advice too well.

• Must-not-see TV: Vacation meant mercifully missing some of the Olympics. I have turned the games off in frustration, refusing NBC's manipulation. I won't stay up late nights while NBC reconstitutes the games into some sort of jingoistic, athletic American Idol, holding the show stopper until past 11 p.m. The network pads the show with the usual sob stories and rehashes of Olympics long past; here's an idea — just show the Olympics, just event after event in short-attention span rotation? Instead I watch at random and create my own visual smorgasbord — a little water polo, a bit of table tennis, a racing canoe heat — and don't worry about what I may be missing. I'll read about it if I have to.

• Must-not-see TV II: San Francisco became the Bizarro Giants in our absence, falling apart in an L.A. Dodgers sweep and allowing the Dodgers to crawl back to the top of the division. The New York Mets stomped the Giants for two games out of three. The one who has usually bumbled, starter Tim Lincecum, became the lone bright spot in that horrid streak, beating the Mets.

Beating up on the lowly Colorado Rockies for some three-game sweep salve once we got back home, the Giants visit the Cardinals this week. The Cards gave the Giants rude welcome in the first game, beating San Francisco 8-2.

• A conversation I'll never have: (Overheard): "Mr. Race Director, I'm not sure you got my time in that race. I think I got third for my age group."

• Them that has, gets: Tell me again why professional basketball players should be participating in the Olympics. Or professional tennis players. Or professional anything. Medals must feel like a lifetime achievement award for them, or paperweights for their piles of money and accolades.

And why is beach volleyball in the Olympics? OK, I've complained enough.

• Red highways: I can't remember if I can't remember, but a part of me recognizes the unique red cinder highways around Bend, built from the lava rock abundant in this land of ancient volcanoes. The color of dried blood, the roads still exist on the trailhead spurs and side roads off Century Avenue in the Cascades, but on the main highway itself, the red highway merely peeks out at the edges under at least two layers of plain old gray gravelly blacktop. After crews obliterated the red roads with black glop, a highway department spokesman said the red highways held no historic value. Okay …

• People of the Klamath, hear me: Do you use Klamath Lake for anything other than drinking and irrigating? It was a dead sea when we drove around it: not a single boat, not a creature stirring. Convinced the maps had to be wrong, we blew out half a day driving around the entire lake in search of camping: A few half-hearted tiny private campgrounds from a bygone century, advertising the standard $5 boat launch fee. One public campground carved out of marshy reeds, ideal for dumping bodies or making meth, but not for camping. That's it? Seriously?

• It does a body good: Determined not to quit the 5,000-meter race, I nonethless had to stop a lot in order to keep this promise to myself. The course was a 2,000-meter diamond for the first loop, then two 1,500-meter triangles to finish. I had gone about 2,300 meters when I took a long rest and looked behind me. The leaders of the pack were about to lap me. Think of it: In the time it took me to swim 2,300 meters, this bunch of churning swimmers had swum 3,700 meters and were on their last loop. The three who would eventually finish one-two-three — nearly an hour ahead of me — were drafting one another, a tight body length behind the other, their strokes matching exactly. They were wearing wetsuits in 67-degree water, but I didn't give them a hard time about it; I was too busy marveling at what well-developed human bodies and strong minds could accomplish.

Head down, trying not to think too much, I plodded on.