Watermans’ Interview Series: Steve Munatones, Open Water Swimmer, Coach, and Advocate

 

 

 

Interviewed by phone, March 12, 2009 by Pete Stirling

 

The description of a juggernaut conjures up images of a huge brutish individual who is all but unstoppable due to their sheer physical size and strength.  However, history has proven that some individuals are capable of overcoming any obstacle on the road to success based purely on their strength of character and willingness to push themselves to succeed at any cost.  Steve Munatones is one of those people.  Born and raised in the beach culture of Southern California, Munatones is a former 25K world champion and International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame inductee who also coached the USA Swimming National Open Water Swimming team at 5 world championships. He wrote the Open Water Swimming Dictionary, covered the Olympic 10K Marathon Swim for NBC and open water swimming for several publications and has participated in the sport as an athlete for over 30 years. He has crossed channels, circumnavigated Manhattan, been surrounded by hammerhead sharks, stung by jellyfish, swum with dolphins and whales and been bitterly cold in lakes in Canada.  Make no mistake; if Steve says he’s going to do it, it will get done.  I caught up with Steve on his way to once again change the sport of open water swimming as we know it…

 

What was your first aquatic experience?

 

I started swimming when I was four.  My parents took me to the beach (Huntington) and I jumped in the waves.  They just thought, “We gotta take him to a swim team!”

 

How did you get your start in Open Water Swimming?

 

Well actually one of the first swim teams I was on had a lot of open water swimmers there, including Penny Dean who set the world record for the English Channel.  So my expectation and the expectations of the people on the team were pretty high.   Living by the beach, obviously there were a lot of ocean swims that I was exposed to from a young age.  

 

How old were you when you started doing the open water thing?

 

I did my first open water swim when I was six, a first grader.  It was just a little one in Naples bay, Long Beach.  I think it was probably 50 yards or something.  I remember going to that event for years. Naples was actually my first the 3-mile swim as well… around an island.  From there I just gradually increased the distance and increased the challenge.

 

You played water polo at Harvard?  Does anything really stand out from that experience?

 

That was a great experience.  I’d played water polo all my life too.  Playing water polo and open water swimming… although people think they are two completely different sports, when you are going around a turn buoy in a crowd of people, the water polo experience is pretty helpful.  But I’d never been on the East Coast before going to Harvard and, while I was there, we got to go to places I’d never dreamed I would be competing as an athlete.  Places like Navy, Army, the New York Athletic club, Ohio, Pittsburg, Rhode Island… These are places that as a kid growing up in So Cal you don’t really imaging you will be going to… Traveling to New York, going to Boston, traveling down to Washington DC.  That was very fun.

 

You had a few nick names back then.  Who exactly is “Yifter?”

 

Ha! You’ve done your homework… My very first day at Harvard, during freshman week, the water polo team got together and the coach was telling us what we would have to do, we were going to do this preseason training and… I didn’t know the level of competition on the East Coast so during the summer I had trained REALLY hard.  The first day at practice other guys were not in shape yet and I was very fit.  One of the things we had to do was a 4-mile run and Coach said go… I took off and ran very quickly.  I’d done a 4:45 mile screwing around, so the water polo players couldn’t keep up with me.  In the 1980 Olympics, an Ethiopian runner named Miruts Yifter had won 2 gold medals in the 5K and 10K runs, so one of the coaches said hey there goes Yifter… and that name stuck.

 

What about the “Clown Prince?”

 

The team was filled with a lot of very intelligent and serious individuals who I learned a lot from and I respect very much.  They all went on to do amazing things and be really successful.  I guess I lent a little bit of levity amongst the team, so I would just do a bunch of crazy things… like the first week one of the exercises was to wear shoes.  Most of the guys brought tennis shoes with the soles cut off, I brought steel toed boots.  The coach wanted us to build up our legs, so I just did beyond what ever the coach asked.  Obviously training with steel toed work boots is pretty tough.  I just did a bunch of crazy things and the team enjoyed the humor of it all.

 

You let a pretty fabled water polo career, but it seems like your true love is marathon swimming.  What is the attraction?

 

I like to train a lot!  The further we could train the better.  I was not gifted as a sprinter and I was not as gifted athletically as others, so where I found my niche was being able to train harder then everyone else.  Even a fifteen minute race in the pool, the longest pool race, was not enough for me.  That is why when I was a kid doing ocean swims and 3-mile swims without any lanes or lines that was really cool to me.  Just getting out there and going as fast as you can for as long as you can appealed to my personality and limited athletic talents.

 

What was your longest race?

 

The longest race itself in terms of miles was around Manhattan Island, 28.5-miles.  In terms of a pro race, my longest was 21 miles.  That was in a lake in Quebec, Canada, but the longest I’ve been in the water at any one time was a double crossing of a channel in Northern Japan.  It took me almost 13 hours and it was a long way… it was 98 km, but a lot of that was because I was being pushed by the current.

 

(The crossing) was in between the main island of Japan, Honshu, Hokkaido and back.  There was one guy who did the crossing before me and he did it like a week and a half before me.  It was actually my plan to swim only one way.  Neither of us knew the other was up there and didn’t know about each other’s plan.  We’d both planned independently and it was a coincidence.  I remember on July 7^th he made the first crossing and it took him 12 hours and I was bummed out because I wanted to be the first person to do that crossing.  Not wanting to give up my dream I decided, ‘OK, if he did it one way I’m going to do it two ways.’  So I just went the same way he did and then I came back.  At least I was able to say I was the first person to do a double crossing and the first to swim back.  I hadn’t planned on it, but when someone did it one way a week and a half before me, I just switched gears and did it both ways.

 

What is your most intense experience to date (in the water)?

 

Ah, intense was I was probably in Mexico.  There was a 24-mile race in Cabo San Lucas, we started at the tip and swam 24 miles to a hotel.  They had the world’s best swimmers there and a very famous Argentinean swimmer named Claudio Plit and I swam the last 12 miles together stroke for stroke.  The water and air were very warm and I just remember Claudio’s boat telling him, “Don’t stop just go!” and I remember telling my boat, “Well, if he’s not going to stop, I’m not going to stop.”  As we know now that was a really dumb thing to do, but when you are in the heat of the battle… we should have been drinking a lot more then we did, but we just went at it.  I think we finished that swim in nine… almost 10-hours, battling it out stroke-for-stroke in intense heat.  I wasn’t going to back down and he wasn’t going to back down.

 

Coaching or swimming; Where is the love these days?

 

What I like to do now is actually coach the coaches.  I do get a lot of enjoyment out of providing advice to individuals, but I think that the sport of open water swimming is now so large that the most efficient and best use of my experience is actually to teach coaches or interested people who can then turn around and coach and guide athletes of all ages.  That is what I do and in June I’ll be doing the same thing for USA Swimming.  They are brining in the top 16 pool swimmers and their coaches and I’ll be educating those individuals and, more importantly, their coaches of the opportunities and challenges in open water swimming.  So to answer your question, right now the love is in coaching and spreading the word even further by coaching the coaches.

 

What are you doing now?  What is next?

 

What is now is actually even grander… for me anyway.  I have a database of about 1,400 open water swims around the world where I will rank by nine different parameters, including distance, water temperature, wind speed, wave height, current, the level of competition, the number of competitors, etc. via three complicated algorithms.  Races are defined by each parameter on a scale from 1-10 scale, giving a degree-of-difficulty ranking.  I’ll call it the WOW Ranking, standing for Worldwide Open Water.  I’m going to post this information on-line and encourage race directors and swimmers to make the rankings more accurate.  Then, over time, I’m also going to ask the race directors to submit their race results to me so that I can rank individual swimmers around the globe.  Based on this global WOW database and the individual WOW rankings, we’ll be able to determine the WOW (Worldwide Open Water) Swimmer of the Year.  It is a rather ambitious goal, but it is what I am set out to do.

 

Right now, I manage three open water websites.  First there is 10kswim.com, a how-to with literally thousands of documents that cover everything from local ocean swims to pro lake swims.  I was also asked to also incorporate the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame information into this website.  The reason I put that site up is to educate people about open water swimming.  The advent of open water at the Olympics fortunately brought a lot of attention and it was used as a reference for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NY Times, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, National Geographic, so that was good.

 

The second site is 10kswimmer.com which features daily highlights of open water swims and swimmers around the world.  It provides content that is a combination of people who send me information from around the world and my own research about different people, places or trends in open water swimming. 

 

The third site is www.SwiMetrics.com which explains a technology that we used with the 2008 USA Olympic Swim Team and American Olympic triathletes and will use with the USA Water Polo men’s and women’s national teams.

 

Sounds like you got a full plate.  Thanks for your time.

 

Thank you.

 

Be sure to check out Steve’s websites: www.10Kswim.com, www.10Kswimmer.com and www.SwiMetrics.com.

 

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 12:57 PM and is filed under Editorial, News and Events, PR.