The lifeguards at the Juanita High School pool know who counts on them. Just ask them who lines up every day at the doors waiting for the pool to open at 6 a.m.

Rick Colella, 56, does laps every weekday, almost without fail.

He swims because it’s good exercise and it’s easy on his joints. Some days it’s harder to get up than others, but it feels better if he does it.

“It wakes you up, gets you going,” Colella said.

Although he swims for fun now, the Kirkland resident wasn’t always so easy-going about his hobby. Colella went to the 1972 Olympics in Munich to swim toward a medal in the 200-meter breast stroke, and had his hopes crash after coming in fourth place.

“It’s kind of the worst place to be, because you’re one place out of the medals — you almost got a medal, but you didn’t,” said Colella.

He went back to finish an aeronautical engineering degree at the University of Washington, and spent the next four years training intensely for 1976 — another chance at a medal.

Colella said he remembers the feeling after the race. He set a personal record at the time of 2:19.20 and snagged the bronze medal.

“I remember looking up at the scoreboard and seeing that I got third, and I was pretty darn excited,” said Colella.

The biggest feeling, he said, was relief. He tried once, and didn’t succeed. He tried again, and he did it.

Still swimming 33 years later, Colella is the type who doesn’t give up.

And so when Colella’s son Brian was diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy in 2003, he and wife Terry refused to stop at the doctor’s shoulder shrugs that there was nothing they could really do. He kept at it.

Brian was diagnosed with facioscapulohumeral disease (FSHD), a condition that affects the face, scapula, and arm muscles of people who are usually diagnosed in their late teens; Brian was 16 and an avid rower at the time.

One of the worst things about the disease, said Colella, is that individuals living with FSHD don’t know what the future holds for them. It’s a degenerative disease and symptoms get worse and worse with age, sometimes in spurts and sometimes slowly.

“The biggest thing that bothers them is the unknown,” said Colella.

Terry and Colella looked at what was going on in the area of FSHD research and saw that it was an area where they could help. Because it is non-fatal, a staggeringly small 5 percent of money raised for muscular dystrophy goes to FSHD. There is no cure, no treatment, and no therapies for the disease.

“The doctors don’t really know what to tell you,” Colella said, “so they just have to kind of send you on your way.

“Having kids, you hope you have normal, healthy kids, and when you think you do since they’re born, and then it turns out they’re not totally healthy, it’s shocking. But it gave us a focus to go from ‘why did this happen’ to helping,” Colella said.

After Brian’s diagnosis, Terry read an article about a woman with Lymphangioleiomyomatosis, a rare lung disease, who decided to raise money for research of her disease and was very successful.

“She thought, ‘Aha! I can do this’,” Colella said.

The two then formed the nonprofit organization Friends of FSH, blindly learning as they went. They hired an auction coordinator to help them with their big annual event — a clothing auction to benefit FSHD research and awareness.

“Now we’re the experts,” added Colella, laughing.

This year’s event will take place Feb. 7 at the Bellevue Hyatt. For more information, or to donate to Friends of FSH, visit www.fshfriends.org.

Brian, now 21, is a senior at the University of Wisconsin, studying history. There have been a few times he’s had issues with his condition, but for the most part, he just lets it roll off of him.

“We work on this and he can just live his life,” Colella said.

It doesn’t sound like there’s an end in sight for Colella’s contribution to research for FSHD. As long as there’s another lap to be done, you can bet he’s going to go for it.

Madelyn Fairbanks is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.