TWIM Strong

What the heck just happened? 

(Disclaimer: Any views and opinions expressed in this blog post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.)

In the span of one week, decisions were made by governing bodies at all levels of our country that has resulted in the USS TWIM being tethered to its moorings in port; a juggernaut, loaded for bear, with no place to sail. And this just before the most important meet of the year: PNA champs! By all accounts it was to be our coming out party; our notice, sent loudly to all others in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, that we are no longer a small or medium team to be reckoned with but a dominant large team that very well may have surprised all and taken home the top trophy! Instead, we have been relegated to a role of thinking “what if”, and changing our training regimens to one more in line with an unknown timetable of when our prowess might be expressed.

Remember, though, TWIM brothers and sisters, we do not bear this burden alone. Secondary and tertiary athletic participants the world over, from NCAA athletes stymied from quests of March Madness glory to PGA golfers hoping for Masters magic and even Olympic athletes wondering and waiting are being left in this limbo.

And though our sensibilities have been racked by these recent developments, we must stop and reflect and be thankful that it is merely our aspirations in the pool that have been hijacked and not something graver as those less fortunate than we, have had to, and are still to, endure.

The year, as I mentioned in the post-Anacortes meet blog, already was rife with too much to think about in national and world events. I refrained from saying in that blog anything Apollo 13-esque (think Tom Hanks’ character’s early declaration, when one of the 5 boosters cut out during launch: “there’s our glitch for this mission”). Now, I certainly had no premonition of what was to happen; really it was just that I had no wood within reach that I could “knock on”. But, happen, this event has. And it is one for the ages. Without exaggeration, I believe this to be a generational event. As terrible as 9-11 was, this, in its gravity, is in the same realm. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the social upheavals during the late 60’s with the riots, Vietnam and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and MLK, the Cuban missile crisis, etc., etc. They are occurrences that define a generation. Mine was defined by the tumultuous 60’s, my kids’ generation by 9-11 and now my grandkids by COVID-19.

So what comes of all this?

Everything changes!

Everything.

Go back a hundred years and think about how the “war to end all wars” changed things; radical world realignments, the disappearance of empires that had been around for a thousand years and a completely new attitude on what “status quo” meant. Then came Hitler and the 2nd World War; the Greatest Generation, the sacrifices made by “men” who barely started to shave and the women back home who took on multiple roles. What a change in the status quo then!! Talk about world upheavals!

Reverberations from WWI have essentially petered out. WWII reverberations, though present, have less amplitude and continue to wane. The 60’s as well as 9-11 continue to reverberate and are such a part of everyday landscape that they are inescapable. And now this little “mushroom coated” virus appears; a shot being fired across our bow. This is not the first one, but it is the shot that has come closest to hitting the USS Humanity. We will pay attention to this one. 

It seems to be insisting. 

It was easy to ignore SARS in ’03 and MERS in ’13. We feared their lethality, (9-10% for SARS and 35% for MERS) but their transmissibility, designated as R-naught (R0 w/ 0 as a subscript) ensured that they would die out on their own; R0<1. But this little beast is different. Its R value is 3-4. Measles is a 13 and is the most transmissible contagion known to man or womankind. So I guess we should be thankful it’s not worse. What’s being done, by limiting interactions, is an attempt to kill it. If it doesn’t spread and has no host to live in, it dies out. I’m sure everyone already understands this but it’s worth repeating.

So what will the “reverberations” be?

Laurie Garret won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1998 classic “The Coming Plague”. In it she predicts that it will “be flu viruses that will be the most problematic contagion for burgeoning human populations of the future.” Her reason for this is simple and inescapable; there are too many humans on the planet. No one species, according to the Rules of Nature, should overpopulate any sub-region, region or the planet as a whole without grave, corrective measures occurring to re-establish the natural balance.

This is life. 

This is the new normal. 

If populations continue to rise, it will just be a matter of time before the R-naught for a MERS-like lethal virus evolves with a 10-13 transmissibility. Then it will be so much more than this present “inconvenience.”

So can human intelligence outpace the virus? Will our knowledge protect us as it has been doing since the advent of antibiotics? That, my fellow Swimmers, is the $64,000 question.

For now, we might be in for a different way of life for a short time but things will return to normal; sports will start again, business will get back to business and most importantly, swimmers will compete again. No matter what, don’t forget this shot across our bow; the next one might hit us square.

Will there be a time in our future when athletes play regularly to stadiums with no people in them; just thousands and thousands of robots, with each robot controlled by a person who pays to electronically connect (virtual reality attendance) and control (a button to jeer, a button to clap, etc.) each “automaton”? Will there be UV disinfecting stations like airport metal detectors that we must negotiate to access any building or meeting? Will there be anti-viral agents in pill form that we all take before mixing with others?

This is an event that defines a generation; my grandkids generation. I pray the reverberations of this are but this present inconvenience we are tolerating now. It’s all in how we heed the warning shot!

Go TWIM!