A Swimmer’s Soul

Training for the Olympic swim trials doesn’t take a rocket scientist. A biochemist, on the other hand . . .

David Schmidt would seem to have more on his mind than swimming. At 21, he is already one year into a five-year doctoral program in biochemistry at California. He breezed through his undergraduate work--in genetics--in two years, also at Berkeley. He is an admitted “computer rat.”

The lights are on, and someone is definitely home.

So why is this smart guy, this whiz kid, taking a year off from his studies to swim from one end of a pool to the other, training for the 200-meter butterfly, an event he has no hope of winning?

“This is the end of my swimming career and I invested so much of my life into it,” said Schmidt, a graduate of Capistrano Valley High, who will be competing today in the Mission Viejo Swim Meet of Champions, which continues through Sunday. “I wanted to make sure I gave it everything I had.”

And his chances of making the Olympic team?

“Hey, anything is possible,” Schmidt said. “But it would take an extraordinary miracle for me to get first or second and make the Olympic team.

“I’m hoping, if everything goes perfectly, that I will have a great swim. I would be extremely happy to make the finals.”

There was a time when Schmidt had Olympic dreams.

Schimdt, who began swimming competitively at age 3, has gone through the addiction. As a 7-year-old, he looked up at the backstroke flags he had hung over his bed and could hear the national anthem, see the flag being raised, feel the medal dangling from his neck.

But he has brains. He could read a stopwatch.

Schmidt’s training isn’t about winning. It’s about closure.

Schmidt is taking a year off from college to train under Mission Viejo Nadadores Coach Bill Rose. He has focused on the 200 butterfly and has qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials in August. That is his finish line.

“I committed myself to this sport for 18 years,” Schmidt said. “It would seem a waste if I didn’t follow through to the very last portion of the last race of my swimming career. To ease off now would seem wrong.”

*

To those who know him--and who knows him better than his mother?--this is just standard Schmidt logic.

“I sometimes wonder where it comes from,” Marci Schmidt said. “He’s just a very clear thinker, a problem-solver. Where most of us will get upset and let emotions get in the middle of things, he keeps working, patiently, until the problem is solved.

“When I was having a little trouble with his younger brother, David mediated. He would say, ‘Now Mom, I hear you saying this and I hear Jeff saying that.’ I was kind of surprised he had that skill.”

But nothing about her son is a shock anymore, even his swimming success.

“He deserves this,” Marci said. “This child chose to graduate from college in two years. I preferred he stay longer, get the whole college experience, but he had a plan.”

That it includes swimming doesn’t surprise her.

“When he was a baby, he would crawl around and it would look like he was swimming,” she said. “When he was 3, we got him into swimming and his teacher was a Nadadores coach. She said, ‘Why don’t you put him on the swim team?’ I still remember him walking down to the pool, carrying a bag that was bigger than he was, with the other parents staring at him.”

Schmidt joined the Nadadores at 3 1/2. A week later, he competed in a meet. It was not exactly his finest moment.

“I lined up and the starting gun went off and it just scared me,” Schmidt said. “My dad was at the other end of the pool with a towel and my mom was yelling, ‘Swim to daddy.’ I told her, ‘No,’ and ran away.”

A week passed, and in his next race, Schmidt finished second against two other swimmers.

“They gave him a ribbon and that was it,” Marci said.

Schmidt immersed himself in swimming.

When he was 7, he hung up the flags, similar to the ones at a pool that alert backstrokers to prepare to turn. The idea was simple to Schmidt. He was going to practice his turns while sleeping.

“At the time, his coaches were talking about visualizing everything,” Marci said. “I think that was part of it.”

Glory was another part.

“Oh yeah, I was going to the Olympics and I was going to win a gold medal,” Schmidt said.

He did dominate his age group as a boy. But as others matured, they passed him--literally in the pool and figuratively in the sport.

Yet, Schimdt stuck it out and became even more devoted. What was appealing was that swimming, unlike school, didn’t come easy.

“He has asthma and some allergies,” Marci said. “We were basically playing ring-around-the-doctor at that point. But the doctor said David loved swimming so much that we should let him swim.

“Swimming has done wonderful things for him. He blossomed through it. The sport challenged him, which was good because school wasn’t a challenge.”

Schmidt tried to enroll in Advanced Placement classes as a freshman at Capistrano Valley. When school officials tried to talk him out of it, he and his family insisted.

“They told us there was no way a freshman could take those courses,” Marci said. “I told them this kid can.”

Schmidt graduated in 1996, having completed most of his college requirements. He blew through Cal in two years.

“I’m in this doctorate program, but after a certain point, if you don’t want to go on, they give you a master’s degree as a consolation prize,” Schmidt said. “I’ll probably go do something with computers.”

*

First, though, there is unfinished business in the pool.

Last summer, Schimdt asked Rose of the Nadadores to train him for the Olympic trials. He agreed, so Schmidt arranged to take a year off from his doctoral program.

“It was kind of, ‘Why be in such a hurry to join the cruel world?’ ” Rose said. “This was his dream and he has always been a solid swimmer.”

Translation: No one ever made any Mark Spitz comparisons.

Schmidt won the 200 butterfly at the junior nationals the year after graduating from Capistrano Valley. He swam three seasons for California. But while he competed, others stood out.

His only event is the butterfly, for reasons, he says, that are obvious .

“Every time I try to swim the breaststroke, people think I’m going backward,” Schmidt said.

While the butterfly does have him heading in the right direction, keeping up with the top competition is probably beyond him.

Tom Malchow is ranked No. 1 in the world in the 200 fly. He set the U.S. record in the event last year with a time of 1 minute 55.41 seconds.

Schmidt’s personal best is 2:02.92, set at the National Swimming Championships in March. He is ranked 13th nationally.

None of that matters. Schmidt has his goal in mind:

“I want to know I did everything I could to be my best one last time,” he said. “I don’t want to look back 10 years from now and think, ‘Maybe I could have done a little more.’ ”