All right, all right. They`ve heard them before, the jokes about how a champion lifeguard is the one with the best tan line by summer`s end, or the biggest biceps under the sun. Or the one who`s perfected sleeping with his eyes open up in the chair.
Give these guys a little respect.
At dawn Thursday more than 500 of the beach warriors will rise, some with quivering knees and jellyfish tummies, and head for Oak Street Beach. There the throngs of bronzed, muscle-packed bodies, aged 9 to 15, will swim, paddle, tow in buoys, run through the sand and play a game akin to musical chairs with beach flags-all feats on the way to the Midwest Regional Junior Surf Lifeguard Championship Medal of Honor.
This is the once-a-year olympics, sponsored by the United States Lifesaving Association, for lifeguards posted at ocean beaches or the Great Lakes. The juniors don`t actually work as lifeguards yet but are training to pass the tests when they`re old enough. Along the way, though, they get to compete just like the big guards.
The defending junior champions, regionally and nationally, are the kids from the Hartigan-Pratt Beach in Rogers Park, where Ald. Patrick O`Connor
(40th) pays the way for about 100 youngsters to compete and sponsors their thrice-weekly workouts all summer.
They`ve triumphed at the regionals for the last seven years, and twice taken the nationals, last year beating out the estimable California team by a whopping 200 points.
With the heat of the championship breathing down their young brown necks late last week, a few of the reigning champs retreated from the waves long enough to talk about the regionals and the upcoming national championship, also set for Oak Street Beach, on Aug. 8. The Senior Surf Lifeguard Championships will be held on the same sands Aug. 9 and 10. In all, some 1,000 whistle-blowers land on our beaches over the next week.
Kathy Porucznik, 15, national junior run-swim-run titleholder, was there last week in her black-and-fuchsia Speedo suit and her T-shirt that dangled to her knees. Michael Schaefer, 13, and Timothy Mueller, also 13 and the regional run-row-run titleholder, were antsy to get this talking over with so they could spend their free afternoon shooting hoops.
They look like innocent gradeschoolers or early highschoolers, with their freckled cheeks, peeling noses and athletic watches overwhelming skinny wrists. But they sound like something else:
”The next beach over (Leone, the city`s oldest public beach) is our enemy. We just wanna beat `em bad.”
”I just wanna win regionals by a lot! Blow `em away.”
”This is the salt-free championship, and we have the home court advantage. Other teams have the saltwater advantage when we go to the ocean. Here, they have to get used to Lake Michigan. It`s not as buoyant. They`re just gonna drop dead hopefully. Sink to the bottom.”
Sweet words.
Clearly this is serious business, so serious that these kids, who could easily while away their summer lounging on the beach or, worse, glued to the tube, have been up at the crack of dawn every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday since school let out in June.
Porucznik downs her breakfast of champions, a cup of cornflakes, then works out for two hours at the local pool, before tossing down a few doughnuts and juice on the way to the beach. Mueller stokes himself with four Eggo waffles, no butter, and two glasses of o.j. Schaefer goes for two bowls of Alpha-Bits.
At the beach they meet up with their personal motivator-slash-coach, Mary O`Connor, sister-in-law of the alderman, who has guided the junior team the last 10 years.
Year-round jocks
This beach program is a pet project of Ald. O`Connor`s, who was a lifeguard at a city pool in the late `60s.
He admits to being a frustrated beach guard because poor vision barred him from the shore: 20-20 vision is required for guards keeping watch over swimmers in the sometimes perilous surf.
Coach O`Connor downplays her personal motivating power.
”The beach is a motivator in itself,” she says, kicking her foot in the sand. ”Kids love to come to the beach. They`re offered all the equipment. No other kids get to use equipment.”
That includes a pyramid of banana-colored paddle boards and a fleet of sailboats and rowboats.
Other than that, they`re left to their own anatomical devices: ankles strong enough to trudge through a mile of sand several times a day, thighs to make it through a couple of miles of flutter-kicking and running, and backs and biceps capable of rowing, swimming and paddling 400 wavy yards at a crack. Pigging out
With musculature straight out of Gray`s Anatomy, these junior jocks are clearly year-round athletes. This beach action is merely the summer installment of calendars packed with sports. In the case of Porucznik, it`s lifeguard training in the summer, swim team in the fall and track team in the spring.
This is the daily beach drill:
The morning gets off to a pulse-soaring start with calisthenics, a few hundred pushups and jumping jacks. Then it`s a 1-mile run, half on concrete, half on sand. (Try running even a few yards in soft sand.) Then it`s time for the boat carry: shouldering 150-pound row boats to the water`s edge. Paddle boards the size of surf boards are carried down next. Then the young competitors row 400 yards, return to shore, paddle 400 yards, and on and on.
”We chow down at lunch, we`re pigs,” says Porucznik. ”We keep the White Hen in business.” A day`s lunch averages two submarine sandwiches each for the boys. The girls stick to more delicate fare: fruit and yogurt and lots of Big Sports Squeeze, a health-drink anomaly loaded with caffeine and sugar. Seventy-five minutes later it`s back to the beach for an afternoon of sprint exercises, run-swim-run matches, buoy relays, volleyball and the grand finale, tug of war.
”By the end of the day, we`re falling down in the sand,” says Schaefer, who lists the perils of lifeguard competition as hot sun and soft sand. Glass is a big problem, too, in recent years. O`Connor, who keeps the first-aid kit in her charge, says the team averages three to four Band-Aid calls a day.
”At the end of the day, going home, we`re all sleeping in the cars, mostly,” says Porucznik, who adds that she has only one off-the-beach activity: ”sleeping.”
Not a grain of fear
So what is it that glues these kids to the beach, so much so that they wear out three bathing suits each summer?
”We want another jacket and another medal,” says Porucznik, who already has a wardrobe of each of those badges of honor from championships past. ”A lot of people think being a lifeguard is just sitting in the sun. But then when they hear you`re the national champions, they`re pretty impressed-even if they don`t really know what it means.”
And so all week they`ve been carbo-loading on plates of pasta. Some have been walking the beach anxiously contemplating putting their strokes and kicks and flutters to the test.
But not Porucznik or Schaefer or Mueller. Says Porucznik, speaking for all of Hartigan-Pratt Beach: ”Watch out Leone (Beach), we`re gonna wipe you silly.”
