Journal of Training and Competition

by Asya Graf

Journal of Training and Competition

1. 50 Years Since Great October

I’m on the floor of my parents’ living room, among piles of Soviet black and white photos that still smell like developer, and a notebook too thin for what it holds. A hummingbird’s whirr competes with the drone of a lawnmower. It rained overnight and now it smells like sage from the canyon, kelp from the beach. It’s a warm winter afternoon in San Diego in 2024, and I could navigate here by smell alone, this place where I grew up. But before San Diego, I grew up in Moscow, and that place today has a stronger pull, like the ground after you’ve been spinning too long. My mom says something from the kitchen, but I’m already gone, running a marathon half a century ago in a country that no longer exists.

I’m with my grandfather in Moscow on April 30, 1984, as he runs a marathon in Lenin Hills on the Moscow River. A mild day, sunny and bright, 18 degrees, he reports. I can smell together with him the lingering snow melt, mud and mimosa, can feel the pain in his legs on the last 15k. He comes in at 3:19, within ten minutes of his best time. He doesn’t yet know that from here on out, he will only slow down. He is 52.

I’m reading the first entry in my grandfather’s “Journal of Training and Competition,” as he’s written across the cover. The slogan on the cover proclaims, “50 Years Since Great October!” The letters curl around an obligatory hairless head of Lenin. I imagine my grandfather’s hand sliding across the page, recording the following day his impressions of the race, still feeling in his feet the shock of the pavement under his too thin soles (“get shoes with thicker soles for next time,” he notes. Did he?). I picture him sitting at his desk under the window on Obruchev Street, looking out over the yard with the rusty swings, a seesaw in the shape of a rocket, a cement pond filmed over with duckweed. Beyond that is the forest where grandpa runs two hours every day, the only place where he feels free.

We discovered this journal in a cardboard box, the last of grandma’s things that we haven’t yet sorted since her death two years ago. I wasn’t expecting my grandfather to speak to me from inside this box, to find his only diary, or only surviving diary, going on thirty years after his death. Running, then writing about it—this is how my grandfather recorded his life. I will get no more intimate a glimpse into who he was than this thin Soviet composition book, seventeen entries, one for each marathon he ran from 1975 through 1991. In his last entry, he records a Moscow marathon that took place weeks after the failed August coup that effectively dissolved the country we were from. He concludes that entry with a rare aside, “What a year it’s been already…and what else will this year bring.”

My mom and I had already left in 1989. Grandma would join us alone the following year. Grandpa waited until late 1992, and only made up his mind after the grocery stores emptied and universities stopped paying salaries. Over the next three years, he ran marathons in San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas. His times by then were an hour off his best time. He ran listing to the side, each step sending stabbing pain up into his injured knee,¹ his heart beating erratically, warnings he knew he should heed, but that would mean running far less. In the Soviet Union, he’d been a member of the Academy of Sciences. In America, where he could barely speak the language, he was a janitor, a house painter, a gardener. But he kept on fluently speaking the language of his running body, two hours every day.

On the morning of June 4, 1997, the week I graduated high school, he ran for the last time on Highway 101, along the luminous vastness of the ocean he’d loved. His heart stopped for good later that night.

2. Athletic archive

My grandma, the non-athlete among us, the marathon widow, the mother and grandmother of swimmer girls, became the curator of our athletic archive. She kept it at the bottom of her closet, in Soviet plastic bags and Payless shoeboxes, brushed by the hems of the kaleidoscopic polyester dresses she’d been gifted by young men from Sudan, India, Vietnam, who came to study in Moscow and flirt with the girls. She saved the dresses as she did the documents, in America every shred of our Soviet lives becoming precious and together acquiring the dignity of an archive.

When my mom was packing up her mother’s things to move her to a care home, she sat on the floor paralyzed by the discovery, all the memories she couldn’t bear to revisit.² She sorted through what she could, sent some of it to me. Among the documents were two of my grandpa’s sweat-stained race bibs numbered 64 and 137, yellowing Pravda clippings with race results, photos of my grandparents horsing around on skis, my grandpa rubbing snow on his bare chest, a stopwatch in a pink plastic coffin-shaped case. And two notebooks.

Those two notebooks. Their arrival in the mail set off in me some obsession, some longing, some new incontrovertible understanding of where I come from.

In a pocket-sized Soviet Academy of Sciences-issued field journal, my grandfather recorded my mom’s times and splits from every one of her swim meets. He coached her for two summers when she was eleven and twelve (“some vacation I had,” mom scoffs when I ask her about it), which means that for three months of my mom’s life, I have a record of her twice-daily workouts in the pools and rivers of Dnipro, where my grandfather was from.³ And I have the stopwatch with which he kept track of her progress.

Three years after those August training sessions, my mom became one of the fastest female distance swimmers in the Soviet Union. In two more years, when she was sixteen, she stopped getting faster. She swam another eight years after that, because her medical school paid her a so-called Lenin stipend she would’ve lost had she quit. She quit in 1978, “the day I graduated,” mom wants me to know. Grandpa’s record of my mom’s times ends in 1975; he begins his marathon notebook that same year. Did he keep recording out of inertia, out of a displaced need to obsess and discipline? Was the marathon notebook his oblique way of saying, I miss my daughter?

The second notebook is about me.

Mom kept a record of all my swim meets from when I was nine to seventeen, eight years’ worth of numbers. From when I was speeding up in the first year after our immigration, to when I slowed down then quit. Like my mom, when I was swimming my best times, I also ranked nationally, also in the 400 and 800 free, with a stroke so similar I often can’t tell us apart in photos. And then, my body forgot how to move in water, much too early, around the same age as my mom. The pool went from being home to exile, solitary confinement. I cried into my goggles on the endless main sets, pressed the shaving razor into my ankles till I drew blood in the shower after bad races and practices, which by then was all that was left. This went on for two years. After I quit, I didn’t think about swimming much for another seventeen years. Didn’t mourn, didn’t care. Didn’t even know I was still being an athlete by dissociating, splitting, ignoring the pain.

None of that is in my mom’s notebook, but it’s all legible in the abysmal times I can barely bring myself to look at now.

Together, the three notebooks document our athletic lives, across two countries, three generations, four decades. I’ve added grandpa’s notebook to the rest of the archive, stored in three plastic bins at the bottom of my closet. In the bins you’ll also find my grandfather’s sweaty headbands with the names of the marathons embroidered on; medals with the bald pate of Lenin still shining brightly; award certificates bestowing the title of Master of Sports on my grandfather for running and cross-country skiing and on my mother for swimming; a naked photo of my grandfather diving into a pond (view thankfully from the back); photos of my mother smiling up at the camera from the pool at the Palace of Pioneers, her white-capped head bobbing above the dark water; and an album of my mother and me swimming together in American pools, lap swimming through our vacations, our swimming bodies hard to distinguish.

3. Home pool

The summer of 1989, coastal sage scrub and eucalyptus replaced birch and the bright red shock of rowan berries in winter. My mom married an American man she’d met on a visit earlier that year. On July 24^th, we boarded a Pan Am flight, and on July 25^th there was a new country, language, an American dad with a blue house in an old avocado orchard. Families of skunks and possum trooped by our back door at night.⁴ The cats slept on the warm hood of the car in the garage. Green beetles swarmed around the fig tree in the backyard and terrified my mother. The girls in school wore neon pink tube socks. Hot pink bougainvillea exploded like May First fireworks over chain-link fences. My name was now Anna-stayzha, and the speakers of that name made fun of how I said “fit” for “feet” and dropped or added articles in all the wrong places.

Only the pool still made sense, its measures of lanes and black lines on the bottom and flags off the wall reassuring and familiar. So, my mom and I kept swimming, and in the six-lane, 25-yard sunny, outdoor pool where my team trained and my mom lap-swam, we could still speak fluently the language of our swimming bodies, of fly-back-breast-free, tight streamlines and snappy flip turns and 10x100s IM on the 1:30 let’s go on the top! For the next seven years, swimming kept fulfilling the promise that as long as I was good, I’d belong. With each practice, each Junior then Senior Nationals, each qualifying time, I proved to myself there was nothing to grieve, there’d been no loss. My home had come with me: my jock girl body, my jock family, and a bright future of diminishing times. 

I hardly recognize myself in photos right after our immigration. My body is tan and wiry where before it was Moscow-pale. My arms are draped around teammates’ shoulders, all of us in matching team suits and caps, beaming. Only in photos taken on deck of a pool does my face look relaxed, the smile real and not self-conscious. After immigration, and maybe even before, only as a swimmer girl did I know how to stop seeming and start to be, to shed my clothes, my accent, my awkwardness, and feel the cool water support my body like nothing and no one else could.

For my grandfather, too, sports was the only native language he got to keep. In my family, we ran and we skied and we swam to feel real, to feel like ourselves when so much else fell apart.

4. Cathedral-pool-cathedral

Not long after our immigration, my mom sent my father,⁵ who did not immigrate, one of those swimming photos along with a letter I’d written to him. I’d recently had my braces removed, and there I was with my California girl smile and my swimmer girl racoon eyes. My father did not reply and I did not write to him again.

Three years after I quit swimming, I was twenty and missed my father, or missed something that I was calling “father.” It was 2000 and a mild-mannered ex-KGB functionary with an oddly immobile face had just been elected president. Russia seemed more open, more western, than ever. I’d never be fast again, or Russian again. But I could still go home again, I thought. I was studying in France, and Moscow was a three-hour flight away. Return had never seemed easier.

That summer, the peat bogs in the forests around Moscow were burning. The city, choked in smog even at the best of times, was blanketed with a grayish-yellow cloud. I walked around the city breathing in the ash of prehistoric animals; rode the subway to its southwestern terminus, where we’d lived after my mom left my father; got lost in the medieval streets in the Arbat district, where my father lived with his family. But my father’s home was not my home. I’d undergone the absurdities of Soviet bureaucracy to restore my citizenship, imagining I’d visit often, revive my native language, bond with my second, Russian family. I had a fantasy that the place where I was from could be home again, that return to past places, past selves was possible.

One evening, my father and I were drinking warm Pepsis at a café of the Lenin Hills ski jump. Couples in wedding finery tumbled out of cars to have their photos snapped with the view of the river and the Luzhniki stadium in the background, but all they must’ve gotten was ghostly shapes emerging from the haze behind them. I asked my father why he didn’t reply to my last letter. He tried to make a joke about bad Soviet dentistry and his inferiority complex. Then he spread his hands, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “nu, you know, I just didn’t know what to say to that girl in the photo.”

I too didn’t know what to say to the girl in the photo, who still loved something so much and didn’t know yet how much losing it would hurt. I too had cut off my correspondence with this girl and everything that used to make her happy.

“You know, I’m also a swimmer,” my father boasted while I was busy not feeling angry and so missed whatever amends he was trying to make. “I used to swim before work every day at Pool Moskva. You know about that pool, don’t you?” I did not, and let myself be mollified with the history lesson.

Pool Moskva, I’d learn from my father’s story and subsequent research, was an enormous round tank of a pool gouged into a headland on the Moscow River not far from the Kremlin. The pool was built inside a foundation pit for an early Soviet architectural pipe dream, an edifice that was supposed to overtop the Empire State Building by eight feet, adorned with an enormous statue of Lenin. After the project had been abandoned in the early days of World War Two, the site sat vacant until shortly after Stalin’s death. The pit was filled with water and the pool opened in those heady days of the Thaw. But the site stayed cursed. The astringent, badly balanced chlorinated fumes were said to corrode the paintings at the Pushkin Art Museum next door. Women knew to avoid going swimming there alone unless they were looking for trouble, especially in winter when the heated pool exuded so much steam, swimmers’ bodies were invisible from up on deck.

The pool was drained in the early 90s and the Orthodox Church got its way: the old Cathedral of Christ the Savior would be rebuilt, a close replica of the original cathedral that had stood on the site and been demolished under Stalin. Where swimming was, where a Soviet delusion of grandeur was never built, one of the gaudiest symbols of the new Russia’s delusions of grandeur went up, the golden domes glinting in the sun like knife blades.

Later that week, I booked a tour of the new-old cathedral, hoping to learn more of the site’s dramatic history. The tour guide cheerfully praised the new cement construction and the underground parking garage with elevators to take visitors straight to the altar. But the elevator straight to God is for VIP visitors only, she proclaimed with an inscrutable smile, and I didn’t know if we were supposed to laugh. Suddenly, my queer-immigrant-feminist-atheist-Jewish body felt imprisoned in this painted parking garage that smelled like the inside of a folksy Palekh box and where women had to cover their heads.⁶ I longed for the smell of corrosive chlorine from the old pool.

I returned to Moscow one last time four years later, and again the peat bogs were smoldering. My father and his family left for their holiday in Portugal two days after I arrived, so I spent the first week alone in the apartment, walking Asya, the family’s dog.⁷ I subsisted on tomatoes, cucumbers, and Baltika beer. On park benches under dusty linden that had long since lost their fragrance, I read Doctor Zhivago and so evacuated myself from this smoggy heatwave to a driving blizzard on the vast Russian steppe. Even then, I knew I didn’t want to be here, that whatever father or family or home I’d come here to find was not here. I’d forgotten my family’s immigration life-hack, that home is always with us in our athletic bodies. That we speak our best, most fluent native language by moving our bodies. I’d forgotten not only how to speak that language, but that I even spoke it.

5. Grimaldo’s Chair

I didn’t seek out the empty pool, but maybe that’s how the idea of home begins, like a tidal current you can’t see from the beach and feel only once your body is in the water, swept along.

In the years after my last visit to Russia, I ground through a degree like a bad main set then quit the field I’d meant to work in. My partner and I moved to New York, where it’s easy to forget about swimming, about all our past homes and lives. We were living in a 400-square-foot fourth-floor walk-up in East Harlem, I was thirty and unemployed, and so I biked around the city because I still didn’t know what to do other than exercise when I was having a feeling. One cold November morning, I crossed the East River over the vaulting Triborough, landing back on mainland in Astoria, Queens. On my descent over the park, I’d spotted an abandoned pool, and knowing nothing about swimming or pools in my city, assumed it was permanently drained, a foundation pit like Pool Moskva. A cantilevered diving platform craned its neck into the diving pool. Grass grew in cracks along the bottom that still retained a faint shade of blue. At that point, an abandoned pool seemed like the norm to me. I forgot a pool could even be full of water and swimming bodies.

No one else was around, so I let myself decompensate in a cinematic, full-body, sink-to-the-ground kind of meltdown on the terrace overlooking the pool, because all the pools I’d ever left were suddenly vibrating all at once in my body. Remembering can look a lot like falling apart.

After the Astoria pool, I couldn’t stay away. The first time I swam again was in a tiny old bathhouse pool at a West Village recreation center. Short and too shallow at one end, it was the perfect non-athletic pool. But I was swimming, the words of my language floating back up from the green tiled bottom, from under my ribcage. A lap swimmer in my lane asked me if I’d been a professional swimmer. I used to swim, I said, then pretended to be in a hurry to push off, crying into my goggles. I was still good at that.

After, I called my mom to tell her about my first swim in 17 years. Her voice glowed like when I used to tell her my fast times after practice. Was it then that I started to want it back, all of it, or as much as I could still have?

I was still swimming in pools, and on a masters swim team, when mom mailed the two notebooks to me. All this obsession with time, with each other. I too was now back in it, swimming three, four times a week, watching the clock, comparing my splits to back then. After yet another practice where my body sank just as it used to, with the same shooting pain from behind my left shoulder blade, I got out early and stood naked in the shower, weeping like I hadn’t wept over a workout since I was 17. I’m embarrassed to tell you I punched the tiled wall, watched the blood trickle down the back of my hand then dissolve under the hot water. I did not want a pool to be my home anymore. I did not want to swim up and down a black line, always counting, always coming up short. I wanted to relearn my native language, but also to learn how to say new words with new meanings.

It was sometime later that summer that I took the subway down to Brighton Beach with a bunch of my teammates. Come out to the ocean with us, one of them said, you’ll never want to swim in a pool again.

That’s how the idea of home starts, a shift in the tide, and then before you know it your body is being carried along in a rip and there’s nowhere you’d rather be.

The tide was draining out of Jamaica Bay and we rode it all the way to the pier at Coney Island, past the blocks of apartment buildings housing ex-Soviets, past the “shark tank,” a new section of the New York Aquarium glittering in the sun like a shoal of fish as they swerve, past the Cyclone and Wonder Wheel. We stopped by the end of the pier beneath the towering Parachute Jump, the only ride still remaining of what used to be Steeplechase Park. I’d never seen my city, my home, like this, from the water, from my swimming body mingling out here with the sea lice and the salp larvae and the moon jellies. On the way back, we had to work for it, stroking against the tide and the easterly wind. By the time we were back to where we started, I’d forgotten all about times, splits, technique. I had sea lice bites on my breasts and a seaweed beard. My mouth hurt from grinning. In my imaginary journal of training and competition, I wrote: water 71, air 83, wind 11kts ESE. Felt normal. My time: don’t know, don’t care. Get two-piece suit next time so the sea-lice don’t get stuck inside!

Brighton Beach is a Russian-speaking enclave on the ocean, tucked in between the spit of the Rockaways to the east and the entrance to the Verrazano Narrows and New York Harbor to the west. Trains rumble on the elevated subway tracks above Brighton Beach Avenue. Produce crates and slow Russians with shopping carts obstruct the sidewalk. Elderly men and women still peddle, from tarps spread out on the pavement, refurbished DVD players and bulk packages of socks, knock-off fashion bags, and self-help books. If you smile at someone here, they think you’re simple, or simply American. Here, I’m constantly confused by a simultaneous feeling of being home and in purgatory. Sometimes I flash my best California girl smile and pretend to not speak Russian, which gets me friendlier service.⁸

But once I’m on the beach, and then in the water, I’m home.

The open water swimmers congregate by Grimaldo’s Chair, named after Grimaldo Medrano, a young man from Panama who immigrated with his family to New York and swam for his high school. He loved to swim in the ocean, and as a lifeguard out here advocated for the swimmers to be allowed to bend the rules that apply to civilian beachgoers.[9] He died in his 30s from lymphoma, and the chair where he worked was named after him. I wish I’d known him, a fellow immigrant swimmer and social worker, someone I imagine would have a thing or two to say about how swimming felt like a refuge, like a tie to home, like a place where he could be fluent in the language of his swimming body.

After swimming, I shop for roasted buckwheat and pickled tomatoes, Turkish soda and sour green plums. Laden with shopping bags now like everyone else here, my toes still numb if the water is under 65, which is most of the year, I find a window seat on the Q train and try to catch a final glimpse of the ocean before the train turns north.

These days, when the country I was from has become once again (or, more accurately, never stopped being) a violent, repressive, totalitarian dictatorship, not visiting Russia is no longer a choice. As I write this, Putin has just been “elected” for his fifth term, Navalny has been murdered and buried, and the Ukrainians I’ve spoken to say they live now disregarding the air raid sirens because it’s better to die in open air than live in a rat-infested bunker. Pool Moskva is never coming back and the church that replaced it has become a symbol of the new Russia: a replica of the old, but more grotesque. I cannot go back. The reality of this impossibility has not yet sunk in.

Taking the Q down to Brighton Beach, throwing myself in the ocean, swimming off the coast of my city, pushing at the edges of my cold tolerance while trying not to care about my time, commiserating with the ladies in the checkout line at Tashkent market, sometimes in Russian, may be as close to returning home as I will ever get.

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Notes on Soviet Identity and Other Crises

[1] My grandfather injured his knee at twelve sledding down a hill in Guryevsk in Western Siberia, where his family had been evacuated as the German army advanced across Ukraine. My grandmother, whenever she’d tell this story, would pause at this point to say, “and who do you think fixed his busted knee? The Jewish doctors!” Historical clarification: the latter were serving time in exile or had just been released from the camps. And so, in my grandfather’s aching body, most legible in his final American races, is inscribed a Soviet history of violence and a Ukrainian-Siberian boy sledding through it.

[2] Why didn’t I get on the plane and come help her?

[3] By Soviet reckoning, my mother was ethnically Russian, with a Russian-sounding last name. By my western, present-day reckoning, my mom is half-Ukrainian, half-Jewish. My father is half-Russian, half-Jewish. Which makes me half-Jewish, quarter-Ukrainian, and quarter-Russian. But Jewish reckoning would consider me all Jewish, since my mother’s mother and every mother before her was Jewish. After 35 years in America, I still don’t know what to say when people ask me where I’m from.

[4] Did I even immigrate? When Soviet Jews talk about their immigration, they mean a humiliating process of seeking an exit visa, being stripped of Soviet citizenship, ferried first to, say, Vienna, then Rome, then America if you’re lucky. The whole process could take years. Unlike my great-uncle Vladimir, who went the true immigrant route in 1974, my mom and I exited on a tourist visa, stayed on her spousal visa then Green Card, moved into a ready-made American life courtesy of my American stepdad. Just as I doubt what I mean when I say Soviet, or Russian, or Jewish, I doubt myself when I say immigrant.

[5] Do I even have a father? I have a biological father and an adoptive father. The former I’d never call father since, reason a) he didn’t raise me and, reason b) we speak Russian so I call him papa,if I call him at all. My stepdad did raise me but I’ve never managed to call him father, or dad, or anything other than his name, though I feel guilty every time I say Gerry, and hope he can telepathically hear the word dad in my head. I’ve never addressed anyone as “father” or “dad.”

[6] So I am much gratified that Pussy Riot chose to stage their protest performance against Putin in the cathedral in 2012.

[7] A fact I could mostly forgive my father because in my family, the informal version of Anastasia everyone calls me is Nastya, not Asya. I’d started going by Asya earlier that year, because a Russian friend in Paris took to calling me Asya and I liked the sound of it. But until then, no one in my life had ever called me Asya, and my last name too is my stepfather’s, and so when I turned 20, my entire name was reconstructed.

[8] Russian-American writer Lara Vapnyar says it all with just the title of her essay: “I Hate Brighton Beach.”

[9] The law-distrusting Soviet in me loves that open water swimmers are still technically swimming against the rules every time we’re in the ocean, way past acceptable distance from shore, year-around when no lifeguards are on duty, along beaches planted with red no-swimming flags. In the early months of the pandemic, when the city closed the beaches and therefore effectively the ocean, we snuck into the water early each morning before Parks workers began giving tickets to swimmers emerging from the water. I did not get a ticket but wish I had, so I could add that to my archive.

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Author Asya Graf is a psychotherapist, writer, and open water swimmer. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Cimarron Review, Vestal Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals.

Artist Patrice Sullivan lives and works in Phoenix, AZ. Sullivan received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, her MFA from University of Pennsylvania and taught painting for 25 years at Colorado State University. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally.