By Bill Oram

Swimming isn’t just a kids’ game. Chris Stevenson, 44, proves that. The California native and University of Richmond environmental studies professor holds U.S. Masters Swimming records in the 40-44 age group 50-, 100- and 200-meter backstroke. He also is the national record holder in the 1- and 2-mile cable swims. Another achievement as a Masters swimmer, he said, was meeting his wife, Heather, at his first meet. His swimming itinerary goes back to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, where he swam for Greece, and to the University of North Carolina, where he went to school with the most famous Tar Heel.

1. What’s your motivation to swim in the Masters? It’s still primarily fitness. I just want to keep healthy and all that. It’s just that when I have goals, whether they be swimming goals or what have you, that motivates me to push a little bit harder.

2. What’s your take on the current swimsuit controversy? More than anything else I just want there to be clarity in both what is required in the near future and what is required long term.

3. Do you think the young swimmers are really that much faster than your generation or is it the suits? They’re definitely faster. The training, the knowledge of the training has evolved since then. Also, back in my day people pretty much stopped after college. That was the peak of your career, but that’s not the case anymore. I think the suits make a difference, but I don’t think they make as big of a difference as a lot of people think they do.

4. You swam for Greece in the ’84 Olympics. Why? Well, my mother is Greek, a U.S. immigrant and everything. When I was 12 we moved to Greece. It kind of came about – it just happened. We moved to Greece and I was swimming at the time in California. But in order to swim for the club teams in Greece you had to have residency, even to swim for the club team. So we lived there for a little over three years. By the time we left I think I’d swum for one of the national junior teams. And every summer after that they’d keep flying me back to swim in the nationals.

5. What kinds of memories do you have of your Olympic experience? It was Los Angeles, so in a way it wasn’t exotic or anything. But obviously it was a great thing. The whole experience from the Olympic Village and everything. Usually you swim in relative obscurity, but then for a couple of weeks you walk around town, you’ve got your Olympic badge on, people pay attention to you. You’re not in it for those kinds of things but you have people who appreciate you for what you have to go through to be an athlete.

6. Is it more fulfilling to have been an Olympic swimmer who didn’t place, or a Masters swimmer who now holds world records? I don’t really know how to compare the two. I think they’re equally fulfilling in their own way. When you’re young you can be very arrogant about your swimming. Obviously, you have school to pay attention to, but your life is very structured around that. I’ve gained much more of an appreciation for the actual process than the end result. The every day training is really what I like. I also really admire a lot of the older Masters athletes. Someone like Michael Phelps is obviously very admirable, but somebody who’s had rheumatoid arthritis and overcame that – it’s a different kind of story, I guess.

7. Which would you say was tougher to achieve? It’s just different. The obstacles you have to overcome are a lot different.

8. Are you excited about the rising popularity of swimming? I think it’s a good activity, it’s a good lifelong activity.

9. What’s the best advice you can give young swimmers? That they should basically enjoy their practice. Everyone has a certain talent level and can’t change that.

10. The University of Richmond has a swim team. Do you ever help out over there? Sometimes I help with recruiting, if someone comes in whose interested in environmental studies, I’ll help with that. If they have questions about academics and athletics in college or big schools versus small schools.

11. You’ve lived in two of the biggest swimming hotbeds – you grew up in California and live in Virginia now. What makes those places so big for swimming? In California they just had a lot of pools, they had a lot of people who would swim and could swim. In Virginia, I’m not sure. You know how it is, you get a few good programs and it just breeds more success and it just builds on itself that way.

12. Can you describe your training schedule? We swim every morning on weekdays and I try to come all of those mornings, but sometimes I have to miss. But I try to swim five or six days a week. When I can, I try to lift weights in the evening. That’s pretty much the schedule.

13. What do you have to do differently to be competitive at your age as opposed to when you were younger? You don’t have as much time in the water so you have to make the most out of it. So I guess training smarter, it’s not a brute force approach. I guess swim faster when you’re in the water. You have to be smarter about allowing yourself time to recover. When you’re younger you can just pound it out one long workout after the other. Learning to recognize when your body’s ready to stop.

14. How do you balance that with teaching at a major university? Everyone has time that they put aside for something else. It’s just a matter of setting priorities. Leisure time has to be a physical activity instead. Swimming practices are early in the morning so I’m still at work by 8. Probably the hardest is when I want to go to the gym and lift when I’m tired. If I were a normal person I’d probably just kick back and watch TV or something.

15. I understand you quit swimming for about a year before getting involved in the Masters. What made you want to get back in? When I swam my last college meet I thought I was done. It’s not that I didn’t like college swimming, it’s just very intense. It was just very intense. I was swimming laps and met an ex-Florida swimmer and she said you should come swimming. It’s very laid back compared to college or age-group swimming. Plus the people you’re with, some of them take it serious, but all of them are pretty laid back in general. So I thought it would be better to be swimming with like-minded people instead of working out by myself.

16. Pretend there’s a world without Michael Phelps – who do you like to watch swim? I like all of the names that you think of. There’s Ryan Lochte and Aaron Peirsol. The latest is this young guy from Japan who just does so well in the backstroke; he has a gorgeous stroke. Dara Torres obviously has a very compelling story. Natalie Coughlin, I enjoy watching her too. I’m just as much of a fan as anyone, really.

17. How long do you see yourself swimming competitively? Barring any kind of injury or huge change in life situation, I don’t see myself stopping.

18. Your world records are in backstroke. Is that your favorite stroke to swim, or is it merely your best? I’d say backstroke and butterfly are my favorite strokes. I was that much or more of a butterflyer in college.

19. Any words of advice for former swimmers who are thinking about getting back in the pool? The longer you’ve been out the harder it is to get back. I think they should just do it and not worry about what they used to be. Swimming is a relatively injury-free sport compared to others, and it’s something you can work hard at without worrying about your joints or anything.

20. If you could challenge anyone in history to a race in the pool, who would it be? Michael Jordan. We were both Tar Heels. We overlapped. He was a little older than me.

Tags: Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte

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