She’s the ‘distancer’

From her earliest days as a member of the Spokane Area Swim Team, Miranda Moore specialized in swimming distances.

This past spring, at the YMCA national swim meet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., she swam the fastest mile in the history of the Spokane Area Swim team.

Now, she’s swimming all the way to Reno, Nev. Moore, a senior at University High School, will swim for the Wolfpack at the University of Nevada this fall.

“I actually accepted the scholarship back in the fall,” Moore said. “That took a lot of the pressure off my senior year. When everyone else was on recruiting trips, I was able to go to the football games and have a little fun.”

The shortest event Moore swims is the 500 meters. She also does the 1,000, and swimming’s version of the marathon: the 1,650. The mile.

At Fort Lauderdale, she swam the mile in 17 minutes, 9.77 seconds.

She also holds SAS records for her age group, 17-19, in all three of her specialty events: 4:59.61 in the 500, and 10:21.32 in the 1000 to go with her record-setting mile performance.

Moore took up swimming when she was 8 or 9, and it was predicted early on that she would opt to swim long distances.

“It’s always been kind of a running joke that one of the parents joked, ‘Watch her be the distancer,’ Moore laughed. “It ended up happening.”

It doesn’t generally happen that way, however.

“I pretty much make all the kids swim the individual medley,” SAS coach Todd Marsh explained. “That way they get experience in all the different strokes. You never know how they’re going to develop as they get older. You want them to be well-rounded because oftentimes their best event when they’re younger is not their best event when they get older.

“But Miranda, for whatever reason, pretty much stuck with the freestyle and the butterfly and hung in there with the distances.”

Swimming distances takes a tremendous amount of stamina as well as mental toughness.

Unlike runners, who can take off and run uninterrupted, swimmers measure their distances a maximum of 25 meters at a time – the length of a standard pool.

That’s 66 lengths of the pool to make the 1,650.

“The last three or four years we’ve had a group of kids who have fit that mold of being good distance swimmers,” Marsh said. “It takes a lot of skill and a lot of dedication to develop those skills. It takes a special kind of kid to develop as a distance swimmer – you have to have a pretty special mentality to want to do it and to become good doing it at the same time.

“I would imagine that it’s a lot like being a marathon runner, except in swimming all you have to look at is the black line (at the bottom of the pool) and you’re looking at it for a very long time.”

For distance races, a lap counter stands at one end of the pool. As the swimmers complete laps, the numbers are folded back to show the number of laps remaining.

“I count my laps in my head during the race,” Moore said. “That keeps me focused. I watch my counter during the race and that keeps me going.”

Support from friends and family also helps keep Moore going.

After years of two-a-day practices (5 a.m. sessions at the Spokane Valley YMCA pool and 3 to 6 p.m. sessions at Shadle Park pool) and 12-month swim seasons, the SAS team grows close. After all, they spend almost as much time together in the pool as they spend with their families.

And, for Moore, there are her friends at University High School

“All of my closest friends know that I swim and they give me a lot of support,” she said. “They always ask me how I swam, and some of them will even come watch some of the closer meets. That means a lot. It really helps me swim that much better.”

Classmate and swim teammate Marshel Renz, a close friend, will swim next year for Auburn, the four-time NCAA national champion.

Moore is excited about joining Nevada.

“They have built up to become one of the best programs in the West,” she said. “This next year should be one of their best teams. It’s exciting. It’s not like joining a team that’s already at the top. This is a team that’s good, but not quite the best. We can, as a team, build it up to become the best. We’re going to build up to that.

“It puts a lot more pressure on you to come in and perform, but it also will be more fun to do because you’ll know, at the end of the day that you helped make that program the best.”