Las Vegas Masters swimmers take the plunge for health

It’s shortly after 5 a.m. on a Friday, 20 minutes before the Desert Breeze Aquatic Center opens for the day. Headlights of cars pulling into the parking lot bring into better focus the growing line of men and women waiting outside.

Just a few minutes after the pool’s 5:30 a.m. opening, 40 swimmers begin logging three miles of laps under the watchful coaching eye of 82-year-old Victor Hecker, who coached Olympians in California before a two-year gig as UNLV’S first swim coach in the ‘70s.

A long-time real estate developer in Southern Nevada, he founded this Las Vegas Masters swim team 17 years ago after local swimmers aware of his coaching prowess essentially begged him to come back to the pool. Five days a week he’s there for the early 90-minute practices.

“Go easy, hard, easy,” Hecker says, barely raising his voice to the group. The attentive swimmers nod at the shorthand explanation for how he wants them to practice a series of laps of freestyle and butterfly strokes.

The more you talk with members of Hecker’s team — a mix of former high school and college swimmers along with newcomers to the sport — the more you realize how much they respect how Hecker works them.

Many say that while they enjoy the regional and national competition and socializing that the swim club affords, what they enjoy most are the health benefits of swim

HEALING

ming, which recent studies have shown can give someone in his or her 60s the physiological functions of someone 20 years younger.

“Swimming’s saved my life,” says 60-year-old Joe Wyson, the owner of paving company J&J Enterprises and Discount Firearms and Ammo. “I dropped 50 pounds, from around 235 to 185. It’s the most important part of my day. I get so much more done because of the energy it gives me. My attitude’s better. It’s a great cardiovascular workout. I now feel like I could live forever. When I ran, I hurt my ankles or my knees. Swimming doesn’t put any strain on my joints.”

While Wyson didn’t swim competitively until joining Las Vegas Masters about five years ago — Hecker says he was “basically a beginner when he came to me” — one of his teammates, 50-year-old special education teacher Florence Aitken, was once among the best swimmers in the nation.

She earned a swimming scholarship to Southern Methodist University and made it to the Olympic trials three times in the 1980s as a distance freestyle swimmer.