Reuniting with an old love

For about a month and half now I’ve been swimming  at the Y.  It feels like I’ve reconnected with a beloved childhood friend that I haven’t seen in ages. It’s been quite the happy reunion.

As a kid I took swimming lessons at an outdoor city pool for a few summers. My mom never learned to swim and she was determined to see that her nine children would.   I wasn’t bothered by the early mornings, the long drive to the pool or the chilly water.  I thought learning to swim was exciting and fun and I progressed quickly to become a competent swimmer and diver.  I didn’t go to pools much after lessons. I played in lakes and in our neighbor’s quarry pond; being able to swim was my ticket to endless water-based fun. I leapt off docks and rafts, I water skied and floated around on giant inner tubes. I’d swim underwater and see how long I could hold my breath. I’d dive endlessly to pick stuff up off the bottom of the lake.

Here I am, at age fourteen in 1973, after competing in my one and only swim meet (in a bikini my mom made for me, no less!).

 

Sadly, there comes a time when most of us stop hurling ourselves off docks and racing our friends to a raft.  By the time I reached college, swimming, aside from the occasional late night skinny dip, had slipped away.  When I vacation on beaches, swimming is more to cool off or to bob around with my son and daughter than actual swimming.

But now, as part of my training to surf, I’m back in the water and really enjoying myself.  It couldn’t have been simpler to just get in and go.  I love the feeling of propelling myself through the water. The rhythm of the strokes is soothing and meditative. The weightlessness and freedom of movement feels wonderful . I always get out feeling better than I did going in.

I do a variety of strokes in no particular order and take short breaks to catch my breath. I started swimming for thirty minutes and am now bumping it up by five minutes every week or so.  At my trainer Jeff’s suggestion, I climb out of the pool every time I’m in the deep end to work my upper body.   No pounding joints, no getting hot and sweaty and, unless there are classes going on (only once so far), wonderfully quiet.   It is the most pleasant and mellow way to work out that I’ve ever experienced.  

How sweet that my new infatuation with surfing has brought me back to an old love. It won’t surprise me if I continue lap swimming for the rest of my life.  It makes me wonder how many other things I’ve forgotten that I love to do. I’ve read that a person’s "core genius" is revealed by the time they are eleven. Could our true passions be revealed by then too? A trip down memory lane to recall and reconnect with the things that delighted us as a child could be a trip well worth taking! 

Body parts I need to fix

Do you remember the one day last winter where we had some actual winter weather? On that particular day I was running on the sidewalk to my daughter’s school, late as usual, to chaperone an ice skating trip. I hit a patch that was slick and iced and down I went onto my left arm. “This is gonna be a problem,” I thought.   And now, four months later, it is.

Since then my arm has bothered me but I’ve ignored it thinking it would eventually go away on its own.  A recent strength training exercise that targeted the spot caused more pain and  I couldn’t do the exercise.  Jeff did some checking and concluded that the muscle is fine but scar tissue has probably developed around the tendon. He recommends I get some deep tissue massage or ultrasound to break it up.  Strength and proper functioning of my upper arm is going to be crucial to paddling and getting up on a surfboard, I really need to work this out.  

The second problem is my right toe. With no dramatic event to know how or why, my toe and the top of my foot just started to get sore and achy. I thought it might be arthritis but then one day, in a flash of awareness, I realized that I was constantly putting living room furniture back in place by cocking my right foot up under the chair or ottoman and pulling it. Little kids rearrange furniture a lot so I was probably doing this two to three times a day every day for months. 

When I stopped moving furniture with my toes there was vast improvement but the pain has never completely gone away. And like my arm, it's been aggravated by strength training.  It hurts when I do anything that involves bending my toes (lunges, planks, push-ups).  As per Jeff’s instructions, I bought some athletic tape and taped my toe in such a way that it pulls it away from the others and straightens it out.  If it works it will be the best $3.79 I’ve ever spent at Walgreens .

Little ailments or issues that we let drag on are impediments to one thing or another –  greater comfort, contentment,  fitness – and affect our daily quality of life. Why deny ourselves feeling as close to REALLY GOOD as we can get?  It’s so much better to address a problem, however small, properly at the outset. I wish I would have!