I am swimming today, as I do nearly every day. My companions and I murmur familiar questions between laps as we rest at the wall, breathing and waiting, eyeing the pace clock at the side of the pool.
"How many more?"
"Three more. We go on the 60."
We gather our strength, coil our legs and push away, moving, stretching, reaching for the far wall. We swim, together and yet alone.
The day is gray on gray, a barely noticed condition of time and space that matters insofar as it is oxygen, the air we take in in a measured rhythm. Backs, shoulders, hands and arms sense moving water as they flex and turn, grip and pull.
My mind takes in images as my head turns for a breath, my eyes covered with misted goggles. Forms are surreal and distorted, sometimes beautiful in an instant and sometimes a mysteriously confusing blur. My mind plays with all of them as my body goes about its work, its play, my joy. I notice how detached I am sometimes from what I am doing. It's a weird pleasure to be both very tired in this pool and mentally adrift in time and space.
"Go six 200s on a descending interval on the next red top. 3:10, 3:00 and 2:50. Get your legs into it." It's a jot of information that we understand implicitly. We have been programmed and set to work again with these words, know exactly when to begin and how fast to swim, how much to rest. The brevity and simplicity of the instruction is precise, perfectly so. The container of the command allows for release of the mind and spirit, and they fly as if the act of swimming is actually an act of aviation. We are water birds, soaring.
The work intensifies and we are brought to earth. The coach is the designated assassin of our reveries, the remote voice from the dry deck whom we have assigned permission to push us beyond the point we are willing to push ourselves alone. The coach and the clock, with its four colored hands circling silently, demand and expect that we swim, do not paddle and dither about. By complying, we agree. We are keenly involved in effort, movement and flow. The clock is the master, the coach its accomplice. The onset of dawn continues in an almost imperceptible increase of light and visual detail. The clock, lit with a spotlight, is the sun and moon for this hour; we began in darkness and end in light; no one notices the change as it happens.
"Last one. Make it your best."
Why do we obey? Why don't we stop and look at the flock of crows, Escher-esque, above us, silhouetted against the pale sky? We are gradually reduced from autonomous, well-considered mature adults to automatons, slaves of liquid motion, our minds yielding to the simple commands of the coach. It is our desire, each of us, to go beyond what is ordinarily comfortable and gain access to an altered state of being. We are swimmers, horizontal, moving through turbulent water, lost in our experience, enlivened by it.
Then, it all stops. The work has ended. Pounding hearts and heaving breaths gradually calm. Effort has ceased; we are gathered at the wall, blinking at the lightening sky. Now the beauty of the morning is reflected in the stilling waters of the pool. The day has begun. In our minds, the work of swimming has aided the dawn, urged the sun to rise and the stars to recede. But now the coach is simply another person, and we are adults again, minds turning to tasks of the day that lies ahead.
I shower, dress, walk to my car and drive slowly home, noticing how beautiful the drifting mist looks. It's as if a soft hand has blurred white chalk across a painting of Monterey. At home, collected drops of dew bead and shimmer on a variegated leaf, each one like a breath preserved in liquid. Perhaps every breath I took while I swam has been recorded by the formation of dew on this leaf. It is beauty to be savored and understood as fantasy, nourishment for imagination and a salve for my soul.
I swim; I am alive.
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