A Typical Day Swimming with John

I thought I'd give you a glimps of the swimming John and I used to do. Sometimes, particularly in late summer, we would swim for hours and that is no exageration. I This was several years back when I would do Swim the Suck, a ten-mile race in the Tennessee River in the late fall. Since my main goal was to beat Randy Beets, John would help me train. I did two types of practices for the Suck. One practice was 100s @ 2:00. I would build that one up to 25 reps and that was after a long warmup of 2,000 meters or more. The other practice was a straight swim. Each summer, I would build the time until I swam four hours straight without even a water break. When I could swim four hours, I could swim all day. Literally.

What would John do? John treaded water in the deep end of the Twin Rivers outdoor pool. Usually, I would say to myself, "I'm going to make that old man get out of the pool first." John was tough, though, and more times than not it was I who would get out first. When I began to tire, I would stop at the south wall by the deep end and give him a look. Most of the time he would aske me where I was, meaning how many meters I had swum. No matter how many I had, his answer was "Don't you want more?"

If I said no he would respond with, "Well, swim till I get out." It took him eight minutes for him to swim to the other end. But on these occassions it would take 20. Then he would stop and ask again where I was. If I said, "11,700" his immediate response would be, "Don't you want 300 more?" Sometimes I would swim the extra and sometimes not.

That was John. He pushed me, he pushed himself. I performed much better at Swim the Suck because of him. Only over the past two years he began to slow down. He often remineded me. "Remember when we used to swim for four hours?" he asked me several times this year. There is no way I am going to forget. There is no way I am going to forget John. "There was a man sent from God whose name was John."