The second individual in the history of mankind who walked on the water was me, but I didn't want to care. Not only did I pedestrianize the liquid element, but I overtook my predecessor and ran like a greyhound chasing a hare. He ran away from competitive swimming.
At that time, in the early eighties, there were no mobile phones, so no one immortalized the moment, it is also true that they did not have the propaganda apparatus of Jesus Christ, so powerful that even without images it was believed through faith.
At the age of 12, faith abandoned me. The swimming one, I mean. It was too harsh, it demanded an iron discipline and a sacrifice that was not given to me at birth.
Today, after a life in between, I chat with Xavier Miralpeix in Sant Jordi, the marvelous indoor Olympic pool in Barcelona's Eixample. Everyone knows Xavi as Peix because he has been linked to 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 in Nou Barris, so it's easy for me to start a conversation. "I was a bracista and I trained with Sergi López", I let go to get his attention. It is a phrase that never fails me because Sergi ended up being bronze in the Seoul '88 Games, a merit that cannot be compared to walking on water but that is 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 her calm when it comes to correcting and addressing her pupils, because I lived through a swim in which the coaches communicated with the children at the top of their voices, ways that still haunt me today in the odd nightmare. "Everything has changed a lot, it has become more sophisticated," Miralpeix confesses to me without longing. What has not changed at all is the incomparable hardness of this discipline. I ask him how many hours these kids spend swimming and feel a mixture of admiration and shudder.
“A week we do eight sessions. Five in the afternoon and two in the morning, plus the one on Saturday if there is no competition”. “How much distance per session?”, I ask even though I am afraid of the answer. "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 you 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; Saturdays from half past seven in the morning. "There are clubs where you train more," he assures me as if it weren't such a big deal.
(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 hat, my glasses, I choose a merchandise lane like myself and do some lengths to make sure that swimming can be a pleasure. Next to Peix's kids I advance like a snail. I get out of the pool. I return with Peix. Training is over. We sit on a bench watching anonymous people swim like me).
I think of these adolescents getting up at five in the morning, entering the university or high school together with rheumy beings of the same age when they have already swum 6 kilometers between their chests and backs. And I wonder what they're made of. Miralpeix tells me that they are made of a special paste (“they are hours and hours bouncing from wall to wall”, he reminds me unceremoniously), and it sets them apart from other boys and girls their age. "They tend to get better grades because no one else has their discipline, their capacity for effort and to organize their time." They all pursue sports goals, their bodies speak of their titanic daily effort: their shoulders are very wide. “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 state of mind needs it, we get together, we look at the training and competition calendar and I tell them: this day you can go to the disco. And they go in groups. They have three weeks of vacation a year and I recommend forgetting about the water. Sometimes they ignore 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 are way ahead of us”, the expert tells me. I translate for you: after the turn, the competitor counts by regulation with the first 15 meters before surfacing. The Spanish do not take advantage of them, or rather, they do not take advantage of them enough.
Peix knows it very well. Swim faster under the water than on it, as long as you don't know how to walk on top like Our Lord and as a servant, of course. But I have not told Peix that. In any case, praise the water. Amen.
