Life of Wry

So many cool fall flowers–like these red spindlies and these purple spindlies that are growing wildly next to one another in Central Park right now. I could look them up and figure out what they are, and could write about them…

… or, I could just write about swimming, because, really, that’s all I want to talk about.  [Smiles here.]

I got another personal best tonight.  (If I call it a pb from now on, you’ll know what I mean, right?)  I swam 60 laps!  That’s my new pb; previous pb was the 50 laps I swam two days ago.  Sixty laps (in a 25 yard pool) is the equivalent of 1500 yards.  If my calculations are right, that’s just 260 yards (or 10.4 laps) short of a mile. So, I think I have to go 70.4 laps in order to swim a mile.  Not nearly as numerically elegant as running four laps on a track.

But, who’s counting.  And maybe swimming people don’t think in these terms.  And maybe my calculations are off.  Who knows.  It’s all new.

The thing is, it’s hard to count. Well, it’s not hard to count so much as it is to count accurately.  I find myself swimming down the lane saying to myself, “twelve twelve twelve twelve twelve…,” and by the time I get to the other side, I think, wait, was that twelve?  Maybe that was thirteen.  Or I might question if I’m on lap thirty two or twenty two.  It’s that easy to lose track. I have some tricks, but clearly I’m going to have to get better at the counting part.

But I must say, I was made for this sport.

Not that I’m a swimmer.. far from it.  But I am a technician.  I like the challenge of learning how to execute a proper stroke and will work on it until the cows come home, or until I’ve achieved perfection…  which, at 55, may not ever happen.  But I thoroughly love studying the mechanics and working (obsessively) to get it right.  It’s always important to me–sports snob that I am–to look good (really good) doing something.  Not unlike golf, and of course tennis.  And with swimming, there are four strokes to learn, and flip turns, and probably lots of other things. This ought to keep me occupied for a very long time.

And then, again, there’s all that measuring: how far, how fast, how many.. always needing to quantify my effort. That’s me a hundred fold.

I’m really laughing at all this.  Surprised it took me this long to get around to swimming.  Certainly fought it forever (really, swimming? me? uh uh), but if I’d have given it a moment’s thought, I’d have realized that it was a sport just waiting to be mastered, and that I would find much to love about it.

It was, and I did.

Not to mention: it’s a low impact exercise, good for all that ails you, a full body workout, and as aerobic as all get out (especially if you’re a helicopter swimmer, inefficient and all).

And bloody hell, the pool is right across the street. Hoping it remains on this site for a long time to come and that my deltoids hold up.

Neither is a sure thing.

And finally, because this has been on my mind: if I’m going to swim, and write about it, I need to know how to conjugate the damn verb:

Today I swim

Yesterday I swam

I have swum now NINE times!

I would have swum before if I’d known how fun it is.

Yes.  Swum.  I can’t believe it either.