Competitive swimming way of life for Katywoman
Carol Mungavin has leveraged smooth, powerful strokes into stacks of senior swimmedals.
Master’s swimming records? The Katy resident holds U.S. South Central Zone records for both the 50-meter backstroke and 50-meter freestyle.
Texas Senior Games’ medals? She entered six events and won them all at the March championships in San Antonio, raising her lifetime medal total to 16.
National Senior Games? During the 2013 nationals in Cleveland, Ohio, she earned two third-place medals.
To her speed and stamina, Mungavin, 77, brings an inspiring secret weapon. Most people barely tolerate the sharp chlorine odor that rules indoor pools. The smell makes most folks want to go home before the swim meet ends. Not Mungavin.
“I’m one of the few people in the world who loves the smell of chlorine,” she said. “When I’m around a pool and that wonderful odor, I know I’m in my element.”
Her life has rarely led her far from pungent chlorine. She swam at Lanier Junior High, then Reagan and San Jacinto High Schools. Her first gold medal came in Junior Olympics.
Mungavin has coached at two YMCAs and taught lifesaving and first aid. She still conducts swim lessons, balancing that part of her life with church singing and directing two bell choirs. In2011, she sang with her Memorial Drive Presbyterian choir in Carnegie Hall. She found that concert inspiring, though she had to get by on Carnegie’s stage without chlorine whiffs.
Mungavin’s genes traveled well. Each of her four children became a competitive swimmer. Daughter Susan was an All-American at the former Westchester High School and Louisiana State University. One of Carol Mungavin’s great disappointments is that her daughter came down with mono, costing her a good chance to make the 1980U.S. Olympic team andcompete in Russia.
“We think drinking from someone else’s soda can made her sick,” Carol Mungavin speculated.
The United States eventually declined to enter the Moscow Olympi- ad, but Mungavin said her daughter’s making the team would still have been a high honor.
So is succeeding against the best U.S. senior swimmers. National Senior Games are contested in oddnumbered years. After earning two medals last summer in Cleveland, Mungavin looks forward to the 2015
championships in Minneapolis.
Mungavin has qualified for six events — four freestyles, one breaststroke and one backstroke. She plans to compete in each of them. Shoulder problems keep her out of the butterfly.
Those problems have occasionally limited her speed but never her spirit.
“I’ve had two rotatorcuff surgeries on the right shoulder,” she said. “I plan to have the left shoulder repaired in August. Then I’ll be ready for Minneapolis.”