Drills

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Flight. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

Hello! I’m back this week from a circuit through Salt Lake City and down to Los Angeles, by way of three national parks, a ghostly mid-desert opera house, a lush (if slightly derelict) inn teeming with oasis palms in the Mars-scape of Death Valley, and the McDonald’s in Mojave, California, where the McFlurry machine was broken. I got to hike on a snowy mountain; draw up an engineering schematic with my 5-year-old nephew, Adlai (we’re going to tunnel into the Statue of Liverty); watch an intrasquad football game at Brigham Young University featuring my multistory first cousin once removed Zoom; drive the length of the Angeles Crest Highway; and read the tale of Nebuchadnezzar and his image of gold for the Great Vigil of Easter at the Anglo-Catholic parish in Hollywood where I serve as a lector at large. Oh, and I saw Michael Keaton’s back.

Now that I’ve accounted for my absence: Drills.

Drills are on my mind because I had Swim Team this morning at the gym. ”Swim Team” is deceptive: We’re not a team, and we don’t do any of the things that teams do. Except drills.

The scene of Swim Team.

Maybe you had friends who were on the actual swim team. They’ll still speak of waking up at 4 a.m., drowning themselves till it was time for class, then doing it again later. Sometimes they’re still blond, or redolent of the original chlorine—a virtue, in my book. In many cases they weren’t left with much fondness for swimming. Some of these types, though, do come to Swim Team, and they whiz by me in the neighboring lane like neutrinos through a sloth.

I’m OK with this—not from an enlightened posture of renouncement but because I would clobber them if they came to cycling class. I go to Swim Team not to sharpen my prowess but to tailor the edges of my mediocrity, and this has worked: I can cross a sturdy triathlon span faster than I used to, with far less strain.

But what I like about Swim Team is not actually what it’s done to improve my form or conditioning; it’s the physical rendering of an important psychological mechanic, the breaking of a complex problem into more tractable parts. Here, a delicate and urgent choreography is reduced to pieces onto which the athlete can bring a uniform focus. Swimming appears to be a clockwork of moving appendages, but it’s really a subtle coherence of forces or capacities: buoyancy, propulsion, rhythm, elongation, anaerobic durability, affect tolerance.

Thus the flutter-kick drill, with arms streamlined or resting on a board or, one of my favorites, extended out in zombie position from an upward-facing torso. Buoy drills, in which the legs laze around foam and we attune ourselves to the reach and dive of the arms, the long tractive pull through the water, the twist of the torso to the other side like reaching for a top shelf. Sculling, where the whole body sources its movement from just the hands and wrists, on arms shot stiffly out front. A right-arm solo stroke, then left-arm. Frog kick on the back. Breast pull with flutter kick. The shark-fin kick, one arm out ahead and the other reaching skyward from a sideways body.

Other reasons I like this stuff: • It means I don’t have to do straight freestyle for an hour, which would be fatal. • Contra everything I’ve ever heard about lowercase swim team, it imports a sense of fun. • Its effect of demystification, the way it reveals those sailfish in the next lane to be skilled or gifted in many particular movements but not bearers of an ineffable priesthood.

And I like it for its kinship with the other practices of a creative body, writing and music-making and staying in love and so forth, which more than we might care to reckon depend on inveterate repetition, a faithfulness that verges on liturgical; cycles of careful and isolated practice repeated long past the threshold of novel interest. It’s wild how fast you can wear yourself out flapping those palms in a front scull, how the distance you’re covering magnifies the farther you advance. The dividend, if there is one, will show itself as milliseconds, and only after the implicated tissues and neurons have done some invisible diligence. It may never catch you up to the members of the swim team. Which means the motive that had appeared to be ulterior is null; that you’re doing this because you can—because what if you couldn’t?

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.