Meeting the demands in the pool

YAKIMA — In baseball, it would be like being a catcher. In football, a center.

There are no tools of ignorance like a mask or special padding for those who swim the 200 individual medley, but even the rewards for this arduous, glamourless competition contain a reminder as to its nature.

“It feels good when you’re done,” West Valley’s Nikki Cleary said, “but it hurts while you’re doing it.”

Added Eisenhower’s Emilie Pleger, “It doesn’t really matter that the freestyle is the easiest stroke and it’s last, because by the time you get to it you’re basically dead.”

So Michael Phelps wasn’t necessarily echoing the sentiments of his prep contemporaries when, after winning the 400 IM in Beijing, he said, “The freestyle is downhill. The freestyle is all adrenaline.”

When competing for a gold medal? Maybe.

But for Pleger, Cleary and others who engage in competition that demands that they not only swim eight lengths of the pool, but that they do so using each of their sport’s four strokes, the IM isn’t so much a labor of love as it is doing something few others are willing to.

Ike coach Rick Alderson, for example, was asked if he’d volunteered for the IM during his own standout competitive days.

“Noooo,” he said. “I hated the backstroke with a passion. I generally have to ask kids. Our new swimmers will try the 500 (freestyle) before they’d do the IM. It’s definitely the most intimidating.”

Therein lies the glub.

The competitive IMer must not only be able to tolerate all four strokes (it’s the butterfly first, followed in order by the backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle), she must execute each with a high degree of efficiency.

Pleger, the Valley leader in the 100 breaststroke last year as a freshman and a ninth-place finisher at state, recorded the best local time last year in the IM at 2:24.29.

Cleary, an accomplished backstroker, logged last season’s third-best Valley IM time behind Pleger and graduated Naches Valley standout Jillian Garrigues at 2:26.53.

“You can’t have a weakness,” Alderson said. “You not only have to put together all the strokes, you have to master all the turns as well. And putting together the transitions is crucial because switching the strokes can be taxing. You get in a rhythm in one and find a groove, then suddenly you’ve got to change.

“It’s an event where you can drop a load of time, or you can gain a load of time depending on how correctly you swim it.”

Both Pleger and Cleary would like to reduce their times toward the 2:20 mark, and perhaps qualify for state as Cleary did last year.

It won’t be easy, of course, because the IM is so hard. Its difficulty, in fact, can even become an attraction.

“It gives me a feeling of accomplishment,” Pleger said, “because it’s demanding and not many people do it.”

And perhaps these two have been drawn to the IM by being attracted to water since shortly after birth — or even before.

“When I was really little,” Cleary said, “my parents could never get me out of the bathtub.”

Said Pleger, “When my Mom was pregnant with me, she did a lot of walking in the pool.”

But even if they were destined to become IM standouts, both have also learned to avoid the pitfall of overenthusiasm.

“You have to pace yourself,” West Valley coach Holly Dunham-Wheeler said. “Because if you get carried away and start out too fast, by the time you get to the freestyle we’ll have to reel you in.”

Filed under All, Preps, Swimming (Girls)