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Seventy-one-year-old John Ponischil will join about 800 other swimmers in the Stevens Creek Reservoir for the second annual Guppy GetTogether.

Senior swimmer ready to compete in reservoir race

By Steve Enders

John Ponischil is a 71-year-old master.

This weekend, he, along with about 800 other swimmers, will take a long lap through Stevens Creek Reservoir for the second annual Guppy GetTogether.

The GetTogether is the only time during the year that Stevens Creek Reservoir is opened up for swimming, but not just anyone can hop into the water.

The swim is a large event, hosted by local race coordinator J&A Productions, which will organize a similar race at Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos at the end of the month.

The swims are touted by the organizer and Ponischil as first-class events that attract hundreds of professional athletes. Ponischil is one of 12 in his age group that will swim in the Cupertino race, which consists of a 2.4-mile swim and a 1.2-mile swim.

At his home pool in Los Altos last week, Ponischil prepared himself for the GetTogether with his swim club, the Covington Masters, who train at Covington Elementary School.

Masters is a nationwide swimming organization open to anyone over 19 years old. Ponischil said the group, which is now about 45,000 swimmers strong, encourages members to swim in various events throughout the year.

One of the eight or nine races in which Ponischil participates each year is the Guppy swim.

"The reason I do it is because I used to swim in Stevens Creek Reservoir before Proposition 13," he said. After the proposition passed, according to Ponischil, funding for public services, including lifeguards, was stripped from city and state budgets.

Since then, the reservoir hasn't been staffed with lifeguards, and open-water swimming enthusiasts like Ponischil have been sent back to the pools.

Ponischil said he's one of the original members of the Covington swim club, which began about 25 years ago. He also boasted about the swim club's stature, noting that four Olympians have trained in Covington's waters.

Ponischil said he's looking forward to swimming through Stevens Creek's waters again, although it's not the toughest of the open-water races he swims in.

"The others will do the race with wetsuits and flippers. I have to just swim. They don't have any body fat," he said, laughing.

Not that Ponischil has much, either. His training regimen is strict, as he usually swims about 3,500 yards at least three times a week--about 140 laps of a standard competition swimming pool.

"Open-water swims are different from the pool," he said. "It doesn't have an end. You just swim until you finish. When you're swimming a mile, you can only swim so fast."

Ponischil will finish the 1.2-mile portion of the Guppy swim in about 34 minutes, he said.

He also said he's not intimidated by the prospect of hundreds of world-class swimmers hopping into the water all at once. He's done this kind of thing about 150 times before, and in much rougher waters than the glassy, 75-degree reservoir water.

"The hardest one I ever did was in Maui," Ponischil said. "We had to swim a marked course, and there were these big buoys that you could only see when you popped your head out of the water because of the swells. There were 10-foot waves on the shore."

The Guppy GetTogether takes place this Sunday at Stevens Creek Reservoir and includes live music and food for racers. The first swim begins at 9 a.m. and is open for the public to watch.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, August 5, 1998.
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