Off the Deep End: A Profile of Albert Gwo Karna Chelluri
“Karna, I need you to teach me how to play the guitar, so I can serenade girls.” hese were the exact words said to me by my longtime best friend Albert Gwo, who, despite being a four-time All-American swimmer, is still normal enough to ask his “elite” friend for help regarding his awkwardness around girls. His asking
me for help in that category at all really surprised me because attention for being a high-profile athlete is not something he lacks. One doesn’t usually win Varsity MVP three years in a row, get first place in the Central Coast Section, and win a double state title without turning a few heads. He proceeded to slide my black office chair over to the corner of my room and pick up my acoustic guitar. He struck a few awkward chords and then glanced at me, hoping for reinforcement. It was almost comical, he was actu-
ally proud of himself. You’re
the athlete, I’m the musician. I thought to myself. Let’s keep it that way. Albert Gwo is the epitome of a successful student-athlete. The Los Altos High School senior has maintained excellent grades, fitness, and health while following his dreams of being an Olympic swimmer. He recently committed to swim for the University of California at Berkeley (Cal) and occasionally trains at the Olympic training facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Although Albert is an amazing
swimmer, he also has other talents that are overshadowed by his excellence in his sport. As his best friend, it saddens me that people don’t see this other side of Albert. While some students may think that Albert is unrelatable, this is not the case at all. He still has passions and hobbies aside from swimming, despite his great success. Although fans of high school swimming would scoff at me for suggesting this, Albert is really just an average high school student with an amazing talent. Gwo was born in New Mexico, but moved to California in 2004. He played baseball and swam simultaneously until he started competitive swimming. Albert began swimming compet-
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itively for the Palo Alto Swimming and Aquatics (PASA) club in 2008. His success as a young swimmer came to peak when he placed in the top three out of fifty or more swimmers at the prestigious PASA Rinconada meet. “At that point I knew I had some kind of talent, but it didn’t really come out until December of 2011 when suddenly I dropped 4 seconds in the 50-yard freestyle, and that’s when I started getting to the tops of the ranking lists and I started focusing more on sprint events,” says Albert. Club swimming is broken into multiple tiers. It starts with noncompetitive swimming for children and gets more and more competitive as the swim-
mers get older (USA Swimming). The ultimate goal for a club swimmer is to be a member of their club’s national team. This is a very hard task as placement is limited and trials are difficult. Albert, however, made it to his club’s national team in 2011 and has been swimming on it ever since. In his freshman year in high school, he qualified for and competed in his first national meet. Although he wasn’t very proud of his performance at his first national competition, he decided that swimming would be his utmost priority. His primary goal would be to consistently outdo himself with every successive competition. In recent months, he has trained
at the olympic training center with some of the best athletes and coaches in the world. For his accomplishments, he’s received a multitude of awards from the school, his swim club, and even the governing body of competitive swimming. More recently, Albert has beat the Olympic Time Qualifying Standard for his event by 0.12 seconds, placing him around 80th in the ranks for the olympic team (Swimming World News). It goes without saying, he was noticed by college coaches from all over the nation, but after a long and difficult process, he decided that he would attend Cal in the fall of 2016 as a freshman. He stumbles into the hallway in the morning in early December. I step closer so I can give him a handshake. I notice his bloodshot eyes as he takes off his mirrored sunglasses. “Dude, I’m so tired,” he says as he reaches to grab my hand. Albert is usually rather vocal about how he’s feeling, especially when he’s so tired that he can barely stand. His breathing slows as he comes to explain his situation. He explains to me how the preparation for nationals is tiring him out, and on top of getting ready to swim in a national meet, he has to prepare for his academic finals. “I just don’t know if I can do it man,” he says, “I’m so tired and all of me hurts.” He then launches into a tirade of expletives detailing the exact ways in which he was tortured by his swim practice the day
before. This is nothing new. He’ll often seek me out so he can detail exactly how he is feeling, often citing medieval torture, being punched in various places all at once, and being hit by a car. The pressure is on for my best friend, who, being the competitive person he is, decided to take extra advanced placement courses in his class schedule during his junior year along with an intense swimming schedule. Luckily, however, his performance at nationals and during finals would attract the attention of the school to which he has now committed. As if studying for finals and then immediately going to a national championship didn’t sound stressful enough, Albert faces an even greater challenge
in his quest to make the Olympic team. Needless to say, the time commitment to this goal is immense, the hours are long and the practices are intense. Although Albert manages his schedule to accommodate for all of the practices and training sessions, he couldn’t do it without the help he receives from the coaching staff at the Palo Alto Swimming and Aquatics (PASA) club. Albert admits that often times he’ll lose his head during practice and tensions between him and his coach will run high. “Your coach pretty much runs your whole life and it’s pretty controlling,” says Albert, “but if you do the right things, then things get easier between you and your coach” (Gwo). His coach controls many facets of his life, one being nutrition.
“Your coach pretty much runs your whole life and it’s pretty controlling, but if you do the right things, then things get easier.” (Gwo) For Albert, eating the proper diet while swimming is crucial. But contrary to popular belief, he’s not on a specialized diet plan. “You don’t really eat specific foods that are beneficial to swimming. You start to generalize into eating more like a vegetarian actually. You still want your protein intake, but not too much protein,” says Albert. “Our coach says every meal has to have greens... If you make a good habit out of it, it’s really easy to control your
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diet.” It is widely known that swimming is very beneficial to one’s health, and Albert cites swimming as his motivation to lead a fit and active life. But then again, Albert doesn’t really have a choice. He hopes that seeing how physically fit swimmers are will lead more people to take up swimming as a hobby or a sport. Swimmers have excellent cardiorespiratory fitness and also build more dense muscle mass (Weil). It is an ex-
cellent way for the participant to engage all of their muscles and keep their heart rate high for a good workout (“Swimming - Health Benefits” ). In fact, Albert’s excellent health and fitness led me to take up swimming on my own. Ever since I started swimming on a regular basis, I have seen a measurable difference in not only my physical fitness and respiratory health, but also in my mood. Feeling active and physically fit has made me much happier! Maybe that explains why Albert is always so excited. Unlike the rest of us though, Albert doesn’t get to swim leisurely. For him, practices are long and grueling. After school, he’ll go straight to the pool and start his daily swimming routine with some individual stretching. He then joins his team for group dynamic stretching. The goal of this exercise is to warm up the muscles without raising his heart rate. After the group dynamic warm ups, the team does an hour of dryland practice. Although it may seem counterintuitive to do a swim practice away from water, dryland practices are important to
building up a swimmer’s power and explosiveness, so that the swimmer can swim faster. From there, Albert begins the aquatic portion of his practice. He starts with a fifteen-minute pre-set workout which is supposed to warm him up for the main set of the practice. Not unlike many other high caliber swimmers, Albert’s main set is occasionally done in unorthodox ways. Swimmers such as Michael Phelps have often cited unusual practice methods for improvement of technique. His coach, Bob Bowman, was a very creative person when it came to figuring out new ways to train Phelps. “One day, Bob had me practice in sneakers,” says Phelps in his 2005 book, Michael Phelps: Beneath the Surface, “Other days, I’d either swim while tethered to a pulley, while wearing a scuba vest or with an innertube around my ankles.” For some reason, Albert wouldn’t disclose the ways in which his training was unorthodox, but assured me he wasn’t being tortured too badly. He also mentioned that the unusual ways in which he trains become second nature after years of practice, so something that might seem painful to us is just a normal set for him. After he finishes his fifteen minute pre-set, he goes into an intensive main set for an hour and a half. Following the main set is a fifteen minute cool down.
In my experience, Albert has never taken himself seriously and that’s what is so unique about him. Surprisingly, the same holds true while he’s at swim practice. He’s just about as audacious at practice as he is when he’s in class and according to his teammates, that’s what makes him such a great swimmer (Brett). His complete inability to realize how cocky he is just about eliminates any need for him to realize it at all. He’s good, he knows that and he’ll let you know that, too – not only with his words, but also with his blistering times. As great as Albert is at swimming, he’s always looking for hobbies as well. Whenever he
and I both feel overwhelmed with school, we’ll decide to do a home run derby at the closest baseball diamond or even throw around the frisbee disc just to stay sane. “You know I was really good at baseball? Like so good I was on a travel team,” he said once when we were doing a home run derby on the softball field at Bullis Charter School, “but then swimming came along and just started eating up all of my time, so I had to quit baseball” (Gwo). This is a sad example of how Albert has had to cut things out of his life entirely in order to accommodate for swimming. But as busy as he is, he always makes time for his close friends. It might not be too
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much, but it’ll be enough for him to let us know that he cares. Nik Lee and Albert have been great friends since sophomore year, and, like me, Nik doesn’t get to see Albert very often. Whenever we do see him though, he’ll always be out to have fun. More recently, Albert decided that he and I would like to play a professional round of paintball in the woods. In a way, this is exactly who Albert is. He’s a pleasantly surprising individual. I’ve noticed that Albert is very good at only wanting to do things because there is a chance that he could be seriously injured while doing them. He could easily be hit by a line drive while pitching to me at our home run derbies, he’s always the one to lay out to catch a disk in frisbee, and he’s willing to run through a field of flying paint projectiles. As two of his closest friends, Nik and I can both agree that Albert believes that fun comes before safety. “I have a mountain bike,” says Nik, “and Albert thought it would be a good idea if he rode down the two flights of stairs in the 900 wing on it.” He manages to defy the generalization of Olympic-caliber athletes who sleep in hyperbaric chambers and refuse to enjoy life because they fear that even the slightest papercut will end their Olympic career. Albert’s extraordinary talent for swimming doesn’t prevent him from trying to enjoy life with the
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small amounts of time that he has. Like the rest of us, he’s just looking for the next thrill. Albert will continue his swimming career by moving on to swim at Cal. He will continue to train for the Olympics and hopes to make the team in time for the 2020 Olympic games. After Albert graduates from college he hopes to use his engineering education at Cal to start a business. I’d also like to think
that he and I will remain friends no matter where either of us go in life. While it may seem that he has achieved massive success, he still relies on me a great deal. I still posses one skill that he can’t match. How else is he going to learn how to play the guitar for the ladies?
Works Cited Brett, Hana. Personal interview. 6 Oct. 2015. “FINA Releases 2016 Olympic Qualifying Time Standards.” Swimming World News. Swimming World News, 16 Jan. 2015. Web. 05 Sept. 2015. Gwo, Albert. Personal interview. 12 Sept. 2015. Gwo, Albert. Personal interview. 4 Oct. 2015. Lee, Nikolas. Personal interview. 9 Oct. 2015. Phelps, Michael, and Brian Cazeneuve. Michael Phelps: Beneath the Surface. Champaign, IL: Sports L.L.C., 2004. Print. “Swimming - Health Benefits - Better Health Channel.” Better Health Channel. State Government of Victoria, Aug. 2013. Web. 05 Sept. 2015. “Swimming 101.” Swimming 101. USA Swimming, n.d. Web. 05 Sept. 2015. Weil, Richard, MEd. “Swimming: Learn the Benefits of This Exercise.” MedicineNet. MedicineNet, n.d. Web. 05 Sept. 2015.
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