Siphiwe Baleka at the 2011 USMS Spring National Championship in Mesa, Ariz. Mike White/Blessed Photography 18 /// usms.org
IN FOR THE LONG HAUL LONG-HAUL TRUCKER, YALE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE, and USMS national champion shares his passion for fitness BY JENNA FISHER When Siphiwe Baleka started driving his big rig, it was a lot like swimming back and forth across a giant pool something he had given up a decade and a half earlier after just missing an Olympic Trials cut. The road was his lap pool, the double yellow lines his lane lines. Once he d hit a coast he d other way, driving his long-haul truck just as methodically and as meditatively as when he used to hop in the pool and do his warm-up 100s. Though the life of a trucker brings with it plenty of time to think, it didn t exactly keep elite college swimmer at Yale. Not one to just let things happen, Baleka changed his reality. HELPING HIMSELF, HELPING CO-WORKERS Ever full of ideas, smiles, and encouragement, Baleka is the type of man who doesn t sit still long without something to keep him intellectually nimble. It s no surprise, then, that one day while driving down a highway after having made time to work out at a truck stop, he got the idea to start his own business. The company would help other truck drivers not only realize their that truckers some of the most obese men and women in America had an alternative to becoming obese. for just about every population out there, except for the most overweight group in the U.S., plan for truck drivers. That s ridiculous. He researched and put together a 13-week program that focused on spiking truck drivers metabolism with a 20-minute blast of cardio exercise a day, asked them to work multiple muscle groups, and eat multiple meals instead of just one quick one (truck drivers are on such tight schedules they often skip meals and eat horrible snacks, which wreaks havoc on the metabolism, Baleka says) and keep a food log. When he approached his trucking company, Prime Inc., to start an official program there, they gave him the green light for his business plan to coach truckers who wanted to get fit. We were very interested in his program because he was a current driver, and he was making it work for him, says closely with Baleka on health and wellness at Prime. He describes working with Baleka as Eventful. He s an out-of-thebox kind of thinker and he s always coming up with different ideas, and those are good. He s a very motivated, driven person to get results. And fact-driven. Baleka in his rig. Courtesy of Prime Inc. He ll continue to run the numbers and look at the data over and over. The result? In the past year and a half, Baleka s had more than 300 drivers complete his 13-week program. Another 500 ed losing 5,000 more pounds, an average of 10 pounds per person, as a result of exposure to Baleka s DVD and program. He estimates that all of the articles and blogs and podcasts he s written and presented have reached thousands of other truckers, helping them make at j u l y - a u g u s t 2 0 1 4 /// 19
least some small changes to better their lives. He s now a full- for Prime. You know that little voice in your head, asking you Now, is that good for you? or Should you be doing that? says driver James Peterson. That little voice, that s what Siphiwe is. Peterson started the program at 340 pounds. Today he s dedicated to getting in 25-minute and tries to make wise eating choices. Calling Baleka a great motivator, Peterson proudly says that when he last weighed in a month ago, he was at 225. Baleka says it was his life in the pool, from the moment he was tossed in the deep end as a small child, through his Masters Swimming Championship that gave him the tools, the help others make such important changes. BEGINNING OF THE ROAD Baleka grew up as Tony Blake, swimming in a suburb of Chicago. Inspired by an uncle, he turned his focus toward getting to the Olympics. He says local papers wrote about him, swim Michael Bedillion coaches vied for him, and some predicted he d be the first black man to win an Olympic medal in the sport. As a 10-year-old kid, my race strategy was get off the block, get the lead, get to the wall the fastest. I was a sprinter. But can you hang on for the last lap? was the big question, he says. My coaches taught me you swim faster by swimming harder. Meaning, if you don t go out so hard you re going to finish stronger. I had to learn that it was all about pacing myself. He reveled in the challenge, but when he just missed qualifying for the Olympic Trials during his junior year as a philosophy major at Yale University, something inside of him broke. I remember the shock, I remember crying in the warm-down pool. I just wasn t as good as I thought I was. He was done. He had gone out strong his entire swimming career, and with one year left, he felt tapped out. He helped lead his college team to their ship in more than a decade, and when that goal was accomplished, he packed up and changed gears. He wanted to live life unconstrained by the lane lines. So Baleka left the pool and Siphiwe Baleka (center) at the 2011 New Year s Resolution meet at Ball State University, his first Masters meet and first time racing since college 15 years earlier. Team Baleka causes around the world. At one point during his travels, a group of elders in South Africa gave him the name Siphiwe Baleka after a spiritual transformation. He it honored his ancestors that he decided to keep it. Still, it s fair to say Baleka left the pool, but the pool and all its lessons didn t exactly leave him. When I was competing, I wasn t the biggest or strongest how to do the little bits better, out what were the little things I could do better to make up for my lack of physicality. Those things carry over to other aspects of my life, he says. After 15 years of traveling He wanted to do something meaningful, but he also knew he was getting older and it was time to look into doing something where health ben- equation. A friend who was a truck driver suggested he try driving. The selling points included plenty of time to think out his next steps and driving madic lifestyle. Courtesy of Prime Inc. 20 /// usms.org
Siphiwe Baleka was interviewed for one of the daily recap videos at the 2011 Spring Nationals in Mesa, Ariz. Allison Tolpa The life of the truck driver suited Baleka surprisingly well and recalled something that was very familiar and natural to him: Swimming is a form of meditation. Sometimes you forget about what lap you re on. Driving is the same way. It s just a 3,000-mile highway instead of a 25-yard or 50-meter pool. Back and forth in your truck, what do you do with that time? Sometimes it s a chance to think; sometimes it s a chance to space out. Both are valuable. But there was one problem. It wasn t long before Baleka got a trucker s belly. One day I looked in the mirror and I had handles. I had something to grab on to. That had never happened before. And I didn t like it, he says. For the former 5-foot-7- inch, 106-pound muscled kid, this was a startling realization. He didn t want to look like all the truckers he saw at the truck stops. He began researching the best ways to get fit considering his time constraints as a driver. He started adding short 15- to 20-minute workouts anywhere he could: at rest stops, on the side of the road, at fuel stops. He flattened a cardboard box into a makeshift mat and did pushups, burpees, and crunches on that. He would use the ledges of gazebos at roadside picnic areas to do pull-ups and box jumps. If he saw a tree, he d climb it, utilizing as many muscle groups as possible. Wherever his truck stopped, he created different high-intensity exercises based on what he found. After passing a lake one day he thought, I wonder if I can swim across that. I want to swim across that! So he bought a wetsuit and lightweight, fold-up mountain bike park, cycle out to a lake, and run or swim around it, and bike back. 22 /// usms.org
THERE S VALUE IN GETTING BETTER When he first started doing exercises next to his rig, he got his fair share of stares. He says as a black swimmer growing up, he was used to not fitting in. So Baleka did what Baleka does best he focused on the positive. For every weird look, there was a curious trucker who was genuinely interested in what I was doing. Some would even join my workouts, he says. They d just start doing them with me. Those moments felt good. And they helped him realize that many of his own preconceived notions about truck drivers were wrong. Just as he wasn t excited about having the trucker s gut, based on his experiences at the rest stops, neither were many other truckers. The 40-year-old Baleka started formulating a plan as he drove across country. After a while I realized I m Now a health and fitness coach for Prime, Baleka helps other drivers stay fit. Andrea Mueller/Prime Inc. days in college. And suddenly he had the overwhelming urge to see how he d hold up in a swim meet some 18 years after he hung up his cap and goggles and relegated swimming to college memories. He had no idea about Masters Swimming at the time, or even if there was a way for him to join a swim meet at age 40. swim meets for adults and up came U.S. Masters Swimming. It was awesome. I had no idea. He entered a local meet, and the all-around swimmer tried a October 12, 2014 swimpaddles.com j u l y - a u g u s t 2 0 1 4 /// 23
little bit of everything. He also U.S. Masters Swimming National Championship in Mesa, Ariz., along the way. Now that was a challenge he couldn t pass up, and he planned to turn it into a family vacation and introduce his then seven children to what used to be a major part of his own childhood. Nationals, he should probably try practicing in a pool. He started researching where the YMCAs were along his route, and calling to ask if they had a pool, what time lap swimming started, and if he could park a tractor trailer truck there or nearby. If I got all the right answers, I would go to that YMCA, he says. He hoped he could manage to place once again in the top 10 at Spring Nationals that year. What he didn t expect was to win two events. It marked a major turning point in his life and, as it happens, the lives of hundreds of truck drivers. 24 /// u s m s. o r g It was a great feeling. I spent all these years trying to win, trying to be the best, whether it was winning Junior Nationals, was a national champion. That inspired him to try his competed in Ironman South Africa and swam the 2.4 miles in a storm that would have unnerved many swimmers. Unfazed, Baleka left the water in the top 50 out of 1,376, placing in the top third of the competition. With the USMS National Championship and Ironman successes under his belt (all training done while driving full time), Baleka put the plan he had been researching into action. Swimming was the vehicle through which I realized the value of seeking to optimize my performance, physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, he says. It s where I learned there s value in trying to get better. S www.allamericanswim.com