30 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {punchline} room helping each other suit up, a laborious process that involved wearing plastic bags on their hands so the rough outer fabric didn’t cut them. “It would friction your skin off your fingers,” Dana describes. There was a power outage. Dana darted out of the locker room to grab something, leaving her credentials behind. And that’s when things fell apart. Mary grabbed Dana’s forgotten credentials and brought them to the ready room—a place you couldn’t enter without credentials. Dana was trapped outside until Rick Benner recognized her. “Megan Quann’s coach had to vouch for me,” she recalls. “And I was in the next event!” After reuniting with her friend and her all-important credentials, another athlete might have been understanably upset. But not Dana. “It was OK because my little chaos cloud was like, ‘Ahh, chaos achieved! Let’s go fast,’” she says. “My chaos cloud is helpful for me.” And that still holds true today. Dana says she’s happiest when she has “a little too much to coaching: If you put in the work, eventually it’s going to pay off. “I always wanted to be a teacher, but I thought I’d be teaching history,” Dana reflects. “Maybe I’m not helping society as much as a school teacher, but my job … is always to convince kids to do the harder thing—the harder interval, the harder set—to get the better result.” In a sport where success is measured with timers and medals, there’s a lesson Dana is trying to get across to her young swimmers: The process is more important than the result. “Let’s succeed. Let’s go to nationals, let’s go do those great things,” she declares. “But the thing that really matters to me is that when they leave the program, they still love the sport. And that’s more important than anything else.” do” in her schedule every day. Despite having a demanding job and three young children, Dana joined San Francisco Underwater Rugby, an improbable contact sport played in the deep end of a pool. “I guess that’s what I do,” she laughs, “fill every minute and have as much fun as possible. Another strength that has served Dana well is that she’s a classic early bird. Those pre-dawn workouts don’t faze her. And she actually enjoys the enormous amount of work that goes into the sport. “As the kids say, ‘Embrace the suck,’” Dana muses. “Nobody wants to do the super-hard workouts, but they want the results. But I really like to work hard.” She brings this philosophy to her ABOVE: (clockwise) Dana gives a swim lesson; on Team USA with her sister Tara at the 2004 Summer Games in Athens; the pool at Fremont Hills Country Club.
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