July 25, 2000 — The moon sets. The sun rises. Happens every morning.
It’s easy to take it all for granted.
But not for Alice Adams. No, for her each new day is approached as “a gift.”
It was dark out when I first met Adams. Stars filled the sky above Gainesville’s Green Street Pool. It was almost 6 a.m.
“It’s beautiful to me,” Adams said. “It’s just a wonderful way to start the day.”
And so she does. Five days a week, 54-year-old Adams begins her day by swimming.
Last Friday, I tried to keep up. I couldn’t. No surprise there. Adams is one of the fastest swimmers her age in the world.
Today — after practice, of course — Adams flies to Munich, Germany, where she is scheduled to compete in five events at the World Masters Championships.
“I expect to place,” Adams said with complete confidence.
Really, for someone who has beaten back death, what’s a Hungarian a few lanes over?
When Adams was not yet 30, she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Doctors couldn’t biopsy it, so she went through the rigors of radiation treatments and chemotherapy thinking each day could be her last.
She moved to Gainesville in 1984 to be close to her mother, Helen Adams.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Alice Adams said. “I just didn’t know what was ahead.”
Five years ago, Adams was nearly 40 pounds overweight and downing five blood pressure pills a day.
“I woke up one January morning and I said, ‘This isn’t a quality life for me,'” Adams said. It was then, at age 50, that Adams decided to start swimming again, something she hadn’t done in 33 years.
The tumor is still there, likely always will be. It’s small and hasn’t grown in years. Adams has it checked regularly to make sure it stays that way. She assumes now that the tumor was never cancerous in the first place.
But enough about all that. Adams insists.
“Every time I’m interviewed it’s always, ‘She’s the girl with the tumor,'” Adams said. “Well, I’m beyond that. I’ve survived that. And now I’m living.”
Adams, a standout high school swimmer in St. Petersburg, Fla., said it took her about six months to swim all of the rust off. A three-decade layoff will do that to you. By the end of year one, she had shed 37 pounds and was down to one blood pressure pill a day.
One of the original members of the Lanier Aquatics masters team, Adams didn’t wait long to start accumulating acclaim. After her first year of competing, she decorated her Christmas tree with all of her medals. Adams called it her “jubilee tree.”
She was no longer just surviving. She was living. Finally.
“I never used to make plans for the future,” Adams said. “Now I’m setting goals.”
And meeting them. Adams currently holds six state records in the 50-54 age group. She has competed all over the country. At nationals two years ago in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., she placed second in the 100-meter backstroke. She rarely finishes out of the top five in national meets.
Now Adams, who has never left the country before, is off to Munich. Off to swim in the very pool where Mark Spitz won seven gold medals in the 1972 Olympic Games. Off to meet more goals.
“I surprise myself,” Adams admitted. “But I work at it. There are days when sometimes I’m the only one here that shows up for practice. There were two very cold days and it was just the coach and me.”
In addition to her swimming regimen, Adams also lifts weights three times a week.
“Her training capacity is … nobody even comes close to it,” said teammate Bruce Hallowell, 66. “She just has a desire to excel.”
Adams has short gray hair and a pleasant round face. She looks more like a friendly nurse or school teacher than a world-class athlete. But that is what she is. She’s just starting to get used to it.
“I’m beginning to see myself as an athlete now,” said Adams, who has worked at the Gainesville Community Service Center for 14 years. “I never really did before.”
We swam 1,700 meters on Friday morning. Adams did hers a lot faster than the rest of us.
With each stroke, I’d see Adams move a little further ahead — until all I could see of her were some faint bubbles far off in the distance.
With each breath, I’d see the moon.
After practice, we sat poolside and talked. Sunlight eventually made the stars disappear.
Adams is right, you know. It’s a wonderful way to start the day.
If only you didn’t have to wake up so early to experience it.
UPDATE: Alice Adams knew her trip to the World Masters Swimming Championships in Munich, Germany, in early August would be an experience. But the 54-year-old Gainesville resident couldn’t have anticipated what was in store for her at her first meet outside the United States.
Some 6,500 swimmers crowded two eight-lane pools. There were so many swimmers, in fact, that the fire marshal closed off the pools to spectators. Some events were held with two swimmers to a lane. Alice didn’t use the warm-up pool because the crowds made it too dangerous.
Oh yeah, the locker rooms were co-ed.
“You had to wait 20 minutes for a bathroom or shower,” the ever-cheerful Adams said. “Some of the older women were crying.”
To make matters worse, Adams came down with a bad cold early in the competition. She was only able to compete in three of her five events. In the 50-54 age group, she placed 13th in the 200-meter individual medley, 15th in the 200 breaststroke and 25th in the 200 backstroke.
“My times were good,” said Adams, a member of the Lanier Aquatics team. “I didn’t exceed any personal bests, but they were good considering it all.”
Adams said she’d like to compete at Worlds again, although she might wait a couple of years to do so.
“It was a wonderful experience,” Adams said. “But I need to recuperate from this one.”