Swimming strong

Pam Walston had not been swimming in more than 30 years, but about a year ago she decided to get a swimsuit and get back into the water.

“My kids moved away, and I had time again,” the 54-year-old Hoover woman said. “I knew it was fun, so I wanted to do it again. I wanted to get healthy.”

Now, she’s part of a senior swim team at the Hoover Recreation Center that is preparing for the state swim meet for the Masters Games of Alabama, to be held at the Hoover Rec Center on Oct. 3.

The Masters Games are open to anyone 50 and older. There are five seniors who typically meet once a week together to practice, and they do more work on their own three to four times a week, said Jessica McKleroy, their coach.

One or two of them have been swimming competitively for years, but “a lot of them don’t have a swimming background,” McKleroy said.

Some of them got together in February and asked the Rec Center staff for a coach. McKleroy, a 24-year-old who swam for the College of St. Mary in Omaha, Nebraska, and who is in her third year coaching the Hoover Hurricanes youth swim team, agreed to work with them as a private coach.

“They didn’t know if they were doing it correctly,” McKleroy said. So she gives them pointers on technique and helps them plan their practices.

Two of the seniors competed in the National Senior Games, which were held in Birmingham in June, and all of them competed in the District 5 competition for the Masters Games of Alabama in August.

There were only 11 swimming competitors in the district competition, which covered Jefferson, Shelby, Chilton and Walker counties, and the majority of the Hoover swimmers placed first in their age division, said Torrey Teal, the aquatics manager at the Rec Center. All of them qualified to go to the state meet, she said.

There are nine age divisions, starting with 50-54 and working up to 90+, Teal said. There also are nine events, including the 25-meter backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle and 50-meter and 100-meter races of the same strokes. Each competitor is limited to six events, and most of the Hoover swimmers do four to six events each, Teal said.

“They’re doing great,” McKleroy said, especially since most of them have never been on a swimteam before.

Coaching senior adults is very different than coaching youth, McKleroy said. When she’s planning their workouts, she has to keep in mind what their bodies can physically do, she said. Also, she has been teaching them how to do flip turns, but some were reluctant due to vertigo issues, she said. She also plans their interval workouts at a slower pace and thus far has not made them do core workouts outside the pool before they begin, she said.

Walston said she started swimming as a child and even coached a competitive youth swim team when she was a teenager in Wisconsin, but that was because there was no one else to do it, she said. She briefly coached a senior adult team with the Birmingham Swim League when she moved to the Birmingham area, but that was 30 years ago, she said. She never really knew how to dive until McKleroy started teaching her, she said.

Walston said she first started swimming again at the Hoover Rec Center for fun and was asked by others to join the team. 

“I said I would do it as long as wasn’t embarrassed at district,” she said.

She’s glad she joined the group. 

“This is awesome. Everybody should do it,” Walston said. “Some of the people who swim with us are good, and some are not, but we all have fun.”

To learn how to be a part of the Hoover senior swim team, contact Torrey Teal at 444-7751.