Karch madness

To anyone unfamiliar with his sport, Karch Kiraly’s victory at the Association of Volleyball Professionals Tournament in Huntington Beach, Calif., this summer over the best players in the country might have stirred a Roger Clemens moment. Kiraly is, after all, 44, turning 45 in November.

But to understand the significance of his victory, picture this: Lance Armstrong winning another Tour de France – in 11 years. Andre Agassi winning a major – in nine. Jerry Rice not retiring and making a Pro Bowl appearance – in two. They are among the best in their sports, and they all have defied age. But not yet like this.

Live to 115, and the world wants to know how you do it. Be a top athlete at a late age, and there’s a similar curiosity, mixed with an almost vulturelike anticipation of the end.

Kiraly’s longevity is a powerful convergence of nature and nurture, with the eleventh-hour appearance of a new friend. About three years ago, Orange County, Calif.-based trainer-coach Mike Rangel was convinced he had a program that would benefit the beach legend. It was based on a Soviet regimen from the 1970s that had been giving track and volleyball teams a noticeable edge; it focused on the eccentric muscle development that is responsible for the legs’ explosiveness in pushing off or jumping. Called plyometrics, it had been adapted by Rangel to train his son Steffin and other young athletes.

Kiraly already had been subjected to punishing “jump training,” as plyometrics was called then, while preparing for the 1984 Olympics under coach Doug Beal, leaping over lines of chairs and jumping on and off a 3-foot-high box. In his 1999 how-to book on beach volleyball, Kiraly touts a kinder, gentler regimen of plyometrics developed by a San Diego trainer. But it still looks like Russian factory calisthenics compared with the balletic moves that Rangel has put together.

“It’s harder to improve once you’re in your 40s. I was looking for something new and fresh,” says volleyball’s most decorated player. Rangel’s plyometrics “improved my explosiveness, my quickness in covering the court.”

Aging baby boomers can certainly look to Kiraly’s longevity for lessons in their own face-off with aging. For every hour Kiraly competes on the court, there’s an hour of stretching or plyometric training – “money in the bank,” as Rangel puts it – that Kiraly draws from. And while the weekend warrior would like to think that just staying in the game is enough, sometimes staying in the game means learning a program to develop strength and flexibility, the best preventive against injury.

But as well as Kiraly trains, he owes a lot to the fact that beach volleyball gave him the chance to get off the hardwood floors. James Worthy might still be playing today, “but you can’t bounce a basketball on the sand,” says Bill Stetson, an orthopedic surgeon who competed with Kiraly on a team that won the Junior Olympics in 1978. Spared the articular cartilage deterioration that comes with a gym sport, Kiraly nevertheless represents the maturation of volleyball, says Stetson, in which “instead of playing for eight hours like we used to, now they’re training for two hours and playing less.”

How much is good genes is up for debate, although “I remember Karch having these amazing calves even as a teenager,” says Rangel, who played for California State University at Long Beach in the mid-1970s and was noticing this promising kid from Santa Barbara at the beach tournaments.

In 1988, Kiraly and his teammates took Olympic gold in Seoul. Even then, it was about the legs: At 6-foot-2, Kiraly was small for international volleyball, but he made all the difference when it came to beating the big, bad Soviets.

The Soviet Union. Wasn’t that a long time ago?

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Kiraly’s current partner on the AVP tour, Hawaii-born Mike Lambert, was 11 when a Kiraly-led national team erased the disappointment of not facing the Soviets in the boycotted ‘84 Olympics, beating them to win the World Cup in 1985. Lambert was 12 when they smacked the Soviets again in 1986 at the world championships.

But on this late summer morning in Huntington Beach, the man who remembers pre-perestroika Moscow is having no trouble keeping up with the one who doesn’t. Even Kiraly’s footwork is snappier than his 6-foot-6 partner’s. Rangel is leading the pair through a 45-minute program of short hops, dips, jumps and crunches that looks graceful despite the 20-pound medicine balls they cradle in their arms.

“If he moves this quickly with the ball, imagine what he can do without it,” Rangel says. It is a workout Kiraly and Lambert perform twice a week for nine months of the year and once a week for the other three.

Rangel knew when he first approached Kiraly that the workout had to be pragmatic as well as challenging, mimicking the moves of a tournament player and even the tempo of the game. The exercises are punctuated by 10-second breaks, roughly the time that elapses from the end of a play to the next serve. Rangel times how quickly Kiraly does each exercise; Kiraly, ever the competitor, loves working against the clock.

While the beach is a more forgiving playing field, it is still a tough master. The unevenness of the surface is a constant, subtle challenge to the body’s sense of balance, like moving on the deck of a boat. Now try to jump. There isn’t the momentum that comes from running across a firm surface. You are, essentially, leaping from a standstill.

Now crouch and spring high enough to get your shoulders over the top of an 8-foot-high net, where a powerful arm swing can send the ball rocketing 50-plus miles an hour in a second.

The defender on the ground, meanwhile, has about that much time to assess the direction of the set and what the hitter’s body is telling him and push off that shifty surface quickly enough to reach where the ball will land.

As he was making the transition to the sand game in his early 30s, Kiraly says, he saw the potential for a long career, but not if he kept training the way he had indoors.

“I saw other players getting close to it, and I thought I could do it if I trained right,” he says.

Flexibility was key.

“When I was with the national team, I couldn’t even touch my toes,” he said. So he signed up with Adrian Crook, a career firefighter who had come up with a stretching program called Inflex. Crook credits work with a Chinese kung fu master in the 1970s for his regimen, which focuses on stretches that increase flexibility – think splits and toe-touching – for greater range of motion. He has trained scores of athletes in the method, and Kiraly is still doing a 20-minute Inflex routine almost daily, 12 years later.