Synchronized Swimming

So I'm back to swimming.  Done with weights (for now) and back to my second favorite pastime: swimming.  For a while there, I was in the pool 3 times a week swimming strong for an hour.  But that was pre-pregnancy.  Actually, that was pre-Austin.  Not since last August have I jumped into a pool strictly for laps.  And although my endurance has slipped, I'm comfortable going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth for a little while.  Today, I swam 25 minutes, 5 x 200 meters with 1 minute breaks and treaded water for 5 minutes.

I suspect, I'll be in there a bunch as my baby grows.  

We'll be a team.  Our own little synchronized swimming team.  



*Awesome photo from John Carleton's Flickr account, from random google image search - sadly, it's not me.

Endurance

Down in the basement of my gym, I am a part of an elite team known as "Swimmer." My membership of this group is not merit based, certainly not, no one would confuse me for "experienced." Rather, I am simply one of a handful of people who actually use the pool.

I find it spectacular - in a four lane pool, I've never seen more than 3 swimmers. I have thus combined my swim workout with my meditation time. My concentration is normally only broken when I hear someone drop a massive dumbbell onto the ground, which is the ceiling, above me. In this under-the-table, "I know a guy in Hialeah that can do it on the cheap," permit -optional city of mine, I sometimes have visions of the 2nd floor of the gym crashing down into the all-but-empty swimming pool...and a guy from the wrecking crew 2 weeks later yelling to his buddies "Hey, I found a swim cap- was there someone down here?"

So despite that sporadic thought, I love spending my 45 minutes there. Often times, it is my goal to just outlast the occasional dipper who comes out for 5 - 10 minutes of laps. As of yet, I've never gotten into the pool after someone and gotten out before they have. I'm vain like that. On Wednesday, I decided it's time I step up my routine; from one mile in 35 minutes, to whatever I can accomplish in 60 minutes. I was doing well, feeling good at 30 minutes and then a guy got into the pool.

He did a couple laps, pausing to stretch for long periods of time in between before trying a couple more. After gaining the equivalent of a 3rd grader while pregnant and struggling for many months to regain my strength, I've learned never to make any sort of judgement about other athletes, even those one might insist on calling "athletes." They might be having a bad day, be coming off an injury, struggling with a life threatening disease, whatever it may be -all I know is they are trying. So here's this 30 something man, the only other soul in the pool, putting along. And then he stops, just about the time I'm getting tired yet I have 10 more minutes. But he doesn't get out of the pool, he sits on the steps and he watches me. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And suddenly, this "Elite Swimmer Team" I'm on no longer seems that cool. The very rare chance of someone else coming into the basement isn't as relaxing. The idea that I'm working harder than I have in a long time and am on the verge of exhaustion doesn't seem so wise.

I start judging. Only, I don't think he's recovering from an injury or having a bad day...I think he's watching me tire myself out, like a wolf waiting until the deer is too weak to run. It scares me, more than the dumbbells up above, but not enough to get out of the pool.

I kept swimming, because he doesn't know I'm an endurance athlete. Despite feeling like I couldn't take another step at Mile 23 on my marathon, I finished. After seven drug free hours of labor, I bore my child and walked out of the birthing center 4 hours later. I've lived on the streets for a year, I've cried for 12 miles, I've finished a 4 year university in 3 years. I am an ENDURANCE HUMAN.

And I outswam him.

1600 Meters

My neighbor, when I was 6, was on the Olympic Swim Team. My mother convinced this young man to come over to our house and work on the swimming skills of my older brothers' and I. Mostly what I remember is that he made me do too many laps and I had to choose which side I was going to breathe on. He doesn't get swimming, I thought. He only enjoys going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Where is the joy in that?

Years later, long after swimmers started being taught to breathe on both sides, long after I could no longer could amuse myself for hours on end in the shallow end, and months after gaining the equivalent of a 6th grader while pregnant, I returned to swimming laps.

It took me a dozens of sessions a la snorkel & mask to relearn breathing both left and right while making my heart pump (although I never really got used to the looks at the gym). And it took applying my knowledge of Jeff Galloway's training method to convince myself I could cross the pool multiple times without drowning. A couple birthdays later when I started training for the sprint triathlons this summer, I was still pretty uneasy in the pool. I look forward to my runs, I enjoy taking my bike out, but going to the pool always seemed like homework.

But last week, it clicked. The runner's high morphed into the swimmer's high. Three months ago, I committed to defining a swim workout as a total of 1600 meters, roughly a mile. And twice a week, more or less, I've been plugging through, 100 meters of Freestyle, 100 meters of Breast Stroke (I think of it as Break Stroke, since I can catch my breath), followed by a 30 second break. Last week, by the time I was half a mile through, I was craving more - like the water was a drum and my arms were pounding out a jungle rhythm - Bom Bah, Bom-Bom Ba. I didn't want to stop, I could hear the song and needed to continue. I dropped the Break Strokes and replaced them with Freestyle. Bom Bah, Bom-Bom Ba. This is all at a stark contrast to what my swim usually is: Oh, dear god, I have 2 more laps before I get a break. Not last week. No, I understood my old coach's back and forth, back and forth.

Bom Bah, Bom-Bom Ba
Bom Bah, Bom-Bom Ba
Bom Bah, Bom-Bom Ba
Bom Bah, Bom-Bom Ba

I have to go swim......