AQUATICS\Spitz shapes senior team - and himself.

Byline: Jenifer Hanrahan

The coach called out the next set of laps. For swimmers in the fast lane, it was 600 meters.

Mark Spitz decided to sit this one out. He held onto the side of the pool, chatting with a teammate about corporate accounts for his phone-card business.

In 1972, when he was 22, Spitz captured an unprecedented seven Olympic gold medals - all in world-record time. Afterward, he retired.

Then in 1989, Spitz launched a surprise comeback. Competing against athletes half his age in another bid for Olympic glory, his times failed to even qualify for the Olympic Trials.

Now, at 45, Spitz is making a different kind of a comeback. This time, it's not about setting world records. It's about getting back in shape. He's not racing against the almighty stopwatch but against the effects of age.

Spitz has joined UCLA's Masters Swim Team, a group of 100 or so that gets together with coach Gerry Rodrigues several times a week for an organized workout. Masters is the senior circuit of swimming and many pools offer masters teams for people who have lost touch with swimming and want to resume their former love for water workouts.

Some team members are former athletes; others simply enjoy lap-swimming. Competing is optional, and most don't.

The UCLA program offers hour-long workouts, three times a day. Swimmers are separated into lanes according to their ability. Slower swimmers do about a mile in an hour; faster swimmers, including Spitz, stroke two miles.

"I like the camaraderie," Spitz said. "I like the workout. I like the challenge. And I like the fact that I get in shape."

For several years after his 1992 comeback attempt, Spitz just couldn't find the motivation to get to the pool.

On the days he did hit the water, he lost interest in the workout before he worked up a sweat. Without a coach pushing him, without the pressure of facing competitors in upcoming meets, he swam only sporadically.

"I just couldn't stay in the water very long," Spitz said. "I got bored because there was no commitment on my part."

Belonging to a team helped him regain his motivation - a motivation that he feels might help other middle-aged swimmers trying to get back in shape.

"When the coach says do eight 100s (meters), and everybody is doing eight 100s, how can I sit around and do nothing?" Spitz said. "I'd embarrass myself."

Spitz also says that finding a program that offered a morning workout - the time of the day he prefers to exercise - helped.

"If I don't workout in the morning, I get too involved in business. And by the time 5 or 6 o'clock rolls around, I'm just too pooped to want to go and work out," he said. "That works best with my personality."

And yet, while he has been swimming with more regularity than before, his attendance slips on occasion. He has plenty of excuses - a flu that dragged on, a vacation, too much work.

Sound familiar?

"I had every excuse that everybody else has," Spitz said. "So I speak not from a puritanical point of view by putting myself on a high horse so people can say, 'Oh look. He's an Olympic champion. It's easy for him to say.' I am in the same drudgery of life that everybody else is leading. I have the same sort of frustrations perhaps as the next guy who says, 'I just don't have the time.'

"You have to make the commitment."

Before his recent workout, Spitz popped a couple of aspirin to reduce the pain from old back and knees injuries. "I squeak and rattle and roll," he said.

His stroke remains fluid and strong, but he doesn't swim as fast or as far as he used to.

None of this bothers Spitz much, nor does he worry about the extra padding around the middle he didn't have two decades ago. When he trained for competitions, Spitz swam two hours in the morning and another two in the evening, and he dropped from 200 pounds to 175. But training at that intensity is something he wouldn't try again.

"You can't do anything else. You can't hold a job and do that," Spitz said. "I was eating and sleeping and swimming."

Now, swimming an hour, four or five times a week, is enough to keep him feeling fit and healthy. To Spitz, who resides in Holmby Hills with his wife, Suzy, and two sons, it is a stress-reliever and a time for himself.

"I do it for a healthy lifestyle," Spitz said. "I feel invigorated. I feel really good that I work out, because I overcame all the excuses. I made that commitment."

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Photo (color) Former Olympic swimming champion Mark Spitz is a regular at morning senior workouts at UCLA. Joe Binoya / Special to the Daily News