A Leaf, A Dawn Swim

Fog dresses the morning, demure behind a soft gray veil. Unusual humidity lingers in the atmosphere. Sounds are amplified and odors linger as if able to become visible.

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.

Swimming Long Course This Summer

So, as my luck would have it, Coach Mark got up his dander and arranged for a "swim clinic" four days a week, held at the Hartnell College's 50 meter pool. The clinic runs for six weeks. At 6 AM, I gather up my swim stuff, then out to the car for the half-hour drive to the pool. It's summer in Monterey, and on the coast that means the day's temperatures vary between 52 and 70 degrees, more often on the lower end of that range.  It's cold out and fog has settled in like a mean old aunt on a big ugly sofa.  

This is the first opportunity I've had to work out in a long-course pool. It takes a little getting used to.  Like most sports, if you are familiar with a tennis court or a running course, you have mentally set up measuring points to gauge your speed or strength or accuracy.  In swimming, the pool is gauged by numbers of strokes per lap.  A freestyle 25-yard lap for a practiced swimmer is about 8 or 9 strokes; it depends on how much you use your kick and how long your stroke is. If you swim 25-yard pools, you subconsciously time your effort to last for 25, or 50 or 100 yards.  Not 50 or 100 or 200 meters.  

Now I'm adapting to a much longer course.  The coach is talking about the "speed trap" in the pool and I am thinking in American 25 yards when he's thinking in Continental 50 meters.  The first lap on the first day, I am automatically thinking I am nearing the other end of the pool and look ahead through the water and see nothing but blue and the stripe on the bottom. I'm not even halfway yet.  I wonder where halfway actually is.  How do I tell?  No idea.  So, I just swim. Much later, I reach the other end.  It feels like I've swum the length of a small lake.  I'm hearing the coach yell out helpful hints like, "Engage your legs! Forget about breathing! Rhythm! It's all rhythm!"  I try not to breathe and instantly hate life.  I like breathing pretty much; it helps me feel good about myself, and I maintain consciousness better that way, but I also try to embrace the concept of a long streamlined body position and fluidity of motion as I move.  I'm immensely glad I am not being filmed and forced to watch embarrassing videos of myself thrashing and sputtering, out of control.  I try to channel the ease and grace of wonderful Olympians like Amanda Beard or Liesel Jones.  If nothing else, the mental distraction of trying gets me to the other end of the pool.

A 50 meter pool holds a little under a million gallons, depending on the average depth of the pool its full length. I am three weeks into this "clinic" now and still trying to gauge my effort the length of the pool, remember how many strokes per lap I am trying for and goal times for distances and strokes. Swimmers have a lot to think about.  It'd be a big mistake to believe a swimmer just swims.  To keep all the various moving parts of one's body synchronized and coordinated while breathing air, not water, and to recall the shouted instructions of the coach as you are doing so feels like herding cats.  Some cats get away from me, nearly every lap.

I have an ever-increasing respect - awe really - for elite swimmers who quite literally swim twice as fast as I do. Every lap I complete, plowing and struggling along, impresses this upon me.  The youngsters who swim at the same time in distant lanes from mine zoom back and forth, back and forth for two hours, so I just think to myself, "Ignore them, they're 40 years younger than you are." I realized after talking to a couple of other masters swimmers in the pool with me that I am the grande dame of the group.  I hope to kick their booties once or twice before the clinic ends in three weeks' time.  It's not a plan; it's a hope, and hope is good.  I perversely enjoy the fact that they are suffering as much as I am, even though they are going a bit faster.

After my swim is over and I've showered, I drive back through the wide reaches of the Salinas Valley with its rich agricultural fields, farm machinery, farm workers bent to their tasks in long lines, doing hard labor in the long rows of lettuce. I go back to the coast and my rocky shore-bound town. I'm enjoying my own hard work in the pool.  I do wonder why I am not content to just sit poolside and sip a cool drink.  Well, one answer is that there are just very few hot days when a cool drink would be needed.  Coffee is what's needed with so much fog now.  No, moving fast in a big pool just feels good when I can get everything coordinated and going in the same direction at the same time.

The Teeth of the Matter

"Are you a daytime clencher or a nighttime clencher?"

"I do not clench at all," I think to myself. It is impossible to speak, so I shake my head no. I am in the dentist's office for my semi-annual cleaning, and the hygienist is rooting around in my mouth, asking probing questions while she probes with her pointed metal pick.  I remember that Daniel Craig clenches his jaw and looks perfectly fierce, with all his muscles bulging and electric blue eyes blazing. If I were James Bond, I'd clench too, but I am not.  Doing just fine, totally clenchless, here in the dental chair, thank you.  My teeth have been fine for a long time and I expect that they will continue to be trouble-free for an equally long time into the future.

"Your filling back here looks a little bit concave, more so than the last time you were in.  I'm seeing receding gums, worn teeth, that sort of thing. Sure signs of clenching all through here (pressing my gum with a latex-glove-clad fingertip).  And here (tapping with the metal dental pick). And did you say you were flossing regularly?" The dental hygienist is going over my teeth with a fine-toothed comb, so to speak.  She is going over my teeth with a lot of other things, too, and I am beginning to feel a bit worse for the wear. She asks me to open wide, and my jaw clicks loudly.

"Ah ha. TMJ," she says, "Your jaw muscles are probably clenching to try to adjust to the joint misalignment." She extracts her tools and leans into my view so I can see her a bit better. "Does your jaw sometimes dislocate when you chew bagels or apples?  Hmmm?"  I frown, and doubt is nudging under the doorway, creeping into the room.

I glance quickly at the hygienist who is again stuffing all of her fingers into my mouth all at once.  She is talking to me and expecting answers.  She's scraping, probing, polishing and using her squealing dental tool while looking serene, her teeth perfectly aligned and brilliantly clean.

"I'd like to observe your flossing technique," she says crisply, after removing her hands from my mouth finally.

This is akin to showing Yo-Yo Ma your cello technique.  It will never measure up.  Nevertheless, as requested, I show her what I can do, with plenty of wrist flexion, finger dexterity and long trails of floss flicking about in impressive ways.  She's looking at me skeptically and sighing.  I fail the flossing challenge.  Too little up and down, not enough going around corners, and you're pressing too hard on the gums, she says.  She smiles at me and puts all her fingers and a new length of floss back into my mouth to demonstrate the proper technique.

She is talking at length about taking the time to floss, soft pick, and brush regularly, and she goes on for a while about clenching, grinding, jaw misalignment and tooth wear. I am under the impression that my social life is over for good and that I must chain myself to my bathroom sink to remove every bacterium and bit of food that ever crosses my lips or risk edentulation immediately.

I leave the dental office and slink home in a funk, now slotted into the clenching and bad flossing categories of my hygienist's mind. I'm disappointed because I'd actually been brushing diligently, if not flossing regularly.

At home, I sit down to enjoy my lunch, hopeful that the dental visit will become a dim memory very soon.  I bite into my fruit and feel an odd crunch in my mouth.  Clink! A tooth lands on my plate.  A tooth!  Teeth don't just break off for no reason; they must be provoked.  I don't recall biting down on anything like a rock or a nail (who knows, maybe I'd bitten a dental tool).  I look at the tooth, explore my mouth with my tongue and feel a yawning gap back on the lower left side.  I feel no pain and determine that I've broken a crown, most likely by clenching and exerting force on the thing.  I wrack my brain to try to recall any preceding symptoms of impending tooth loss.  Not a one comes to mind.  I wonder if clenching causes amnesia, too.

"I am falling apart," I think. "Literally, my teeth are falling out of my head."  

Now I begin to wonder if I also sleepwalk, sing off key or frighten small children. The creaking door that has held doubt at bay has been pushed open to reveal a host of unfortunate possibilities. I see that tooth lying innocently on my lunch plate and wonder what I might be in denial about, what else could be ready to blow at any second.  I feel like parts of me are simply time bombs, ready to go off with no warning.

Ugh, maybe I have flat feet and varicose veins, too.  Perhaps all my teeth will gradually land on my plate, one by one, when I least expect them to.  I am not so sure about much of anything.  Jeez, I thought I was healthy, in fine fettle.

I call the dentist's office.  They can fit me in at 9 in the morning. They don't seem very concerned; they don't ask if there is pain (there isn't) or how I'm doing (I'm okay).  Sometimes it's just nice to be fussed over and given a bowl of soup and gently rocked to sleep.  I know I'm fine, and the tooth will be repaired again, so what's the fuss? I cannot climb out of the funk I am in.  I don't want to look at the moon tonight; it could crash to the ground or it will be discovered that the man in the moon is a woman after all, or a cross dresser.

The next morning, I am up for my swim and greet my coaches.  He has an obvious limp and she says she has poison oak all over her back, and it's getting worse.  The limping coach had been wading in a creek, tripped on a rock, lost his shoe and smashed his bare foot on another rock. The poison oak coach's rash sounds gruesome and awful; no one wants that kind of itching.  It must be awful.  Wow, I think.

Knowing they are miserable takes the focus off my cratered mouth and my impending second dental visit to recrown the tooth.  I am not alone in my suffering.  Knowing they are worse off than I am helps my empathy reassert itself and my blue mood of self-pity evaporate.  I look around at the other swimmers arriving and realize I am among friends who accept me the way I am, poorly flossed teeth and all.  We share our war stories but also urge each other to swim a little further, return tomorrow.  We can face our challenges anew now that we have suffered together for a little while.

I wouldn't go so far as saying I'm glad I have a tooth war story to tell, but I can say my friends are a pretty durable bunch, what with hobbled feet, itching rashes and bulging disks.  It may be hard getting old, but it's much harder without friends.

Hangin' With My Swim Buddies

Wow, I miss one day of swimming - Monday, which was a holiday actually - and my swim buddies are all over me.  What was my excuse?  Not anything I'd hang a hat on, that's for sure.  "Where were you, Christine?  We were here....(implying "you were definitely not.")

I guess I've found my tribe.

On a regular weekday, there are workouts available, and each one is slightly different than the others.  My group gets in at 5:30 AM and goes for 90 minutes, doing sets of pulling, kicking, drills, and swims.  Go anywhere in the world, and this is what swimmers will be doing when they work out. The intensity of the 5:30 group is consistently good and people are in the pool to improve, swim hard and get fit.

The 9 AM group is pretty much the same, but they only go for an hour or so.  Some swim fast, but most don't.  Most of them are people I've known for a while, and they're a fun group, but the focus is more on socializing and doing a shorter workout.

Then there are the 11 AM and 12 PM groups.  One or two people do both hours, but most people in those time slots are floppers and don't really care about the workout that's up on the board.  Their disinterest is, unfortunately, contagious.  Attitudes affect others pretty easily in groups; swimmers at noon are  certainly influenced by them.

We who swim in the earliest group are the biggest group and the most intent on getting a solid workout.  The only thing I miss is sunlight, but even that has its downside:  I get more distracted by almost everything when I can see it all; predawn limits my field of vision.  Our pool is outdoors, no roof, so it'd be nice to get some sunshine and a tan which translates nicely to Hawaii when you go.  If you go, that is.  

This is about the one-month mark in the semester, and those who had misgivings about swimming early have quietly dropped away, leaving slightly more room in the pool now.  Each lane still has three swimmers or so, which is a good number for a pool of this size and level of ability.  We have sorted ourselves out by pace, so when we circle in the lane (you have to stay to the right of the black line or end up with a concussion after smacking into someone), we are all swimming at the same pace, less likely to catch up with and pass anyone.

With our routine well established and everyone familiar with each other, it's getting easier to tell when someone doesn't show up who is usually there - like me yesterday.

You know, it's not like they'd sit and wait for me to catch up with them in the workout, because they're almost all faster than I am.  I hold my own and swim hard, but my pace is not quite up to their speed just yet.  Someday, I'll surprise 'em. The point is, they know I'm part of the group, and I'd left a hole by not being there.

It was pleasing in a certain way to know I'd been missed, that I mattered and had created a blank space by my absence.  Team-building, even if it occurs by simply showing up, gradually creates a willingness to make an extra effort.  You sense that the work has an importance that's greater than yourself where loyalty and trust are intrinsic parts of the whole.  Those qualities get you through difficult work sets and challenging efforts that you almost always lighten up on when you're by yourself.

I've heard people say, "I always go harder when I'm swimming with someone (and/or) there's a coach up there on the deck."  Camaraderie and friendship are the most valuable aspect of sports teams, the elements athletes miss most when they retire or a season ends.  The strengthening bonds of friendship reinforce group ethics.  Our group's ethic is don't miss a workout, as I found out.

It was good to be missed, to be included in a group of people I admire and respect.  I'll really hear it if I miss a practice, and believe me they will hear from me if they miss now, too.  The kidding is fun, but the underlying message is:  We're in this together, we need each other, so show up and do your best.    

Cold Swim: My Bag Of Mental Tricks

 I looked at the satellite weather forecast in the local paper today. It showed a near-vertical red swooping arrow that indicated the jet stream's path.  It's lassooing straight down from the arctic today, taking no prisoners, laughing at us here in California, bringing icebergs with it - or so it seems.

We're fresh off a week or more of false summer weather, sitting happily in warm pools of sunshine.  The AT&T Pro-Am Golf Tournament came and went, accompanied by the best February weather you could possibly imagine.  Right on the heels of the tournament, real winter weather has blown in.  Yesterday dropped temperatures to freezing.  There has been hail, wind and rain - quite a contrast for everyone to adjust to.

Skiers are happy; a friend is jumping up and down with joy in the Sierra, anticipating a long weekend skiing up there.  Not a skier, I am trying to be happy for her and readjusting myself to winter's icy fingers in a hurry.  Most, if not all of my adjustment is mental:  I have to play little tricks on myself to cope with the cold.

Some examples I tell myself as I swim:

*  Just think how warm the showers are going to feel once you're done with this swim.  And they are.  There really is no better way to enjoy a hot shower than after a challenging workout in the dark in winter with coaches yelling "now go fast!" as if you weren't trying before.  I try to concentrate on how miserable the coaches are up there on the deck; their murderous swim sets are matched by mother nature's crankiness.  Then again, maybe they make up murderous swim sets because mother nature got cranky first.  I'll have to think about that one.

*  Imagine how good you will feel if you don't indulge in a dessert; you'll step on the scale and you'll have lost weight.  That's a hard sell, mostly because the gratification is very delayed.  Hasn't anyone invented delicious food that makes you lose weight instead of gain?  This also means I can't reward my hard work with something like a big stack of pancakes or a caramel macchiato.  Newp, a hot shower will have to be the big reward.

*  Be nice to old people.  They've lived a long time and can do whatever they want; they deserve some elbow room and no restrictions.  I want that when I get old.  But, jeesh, where does that meanness come from anyway?  And how is it that one very slow swimmer can take up an entire lane so you can't pass them and share the lane?  I've had long discussions with friends about "floppers" who do that at our local sports center that has an indoor pool.  It's one of the main reasons my friends and I don't swim there.  Can't pass old people; they're like spider monkeys or something, with legs and arms stretching vast distances as they make their way slowly down the center of the lane.  It really defies logic when you see it in real time.  They drive like that, too.  Slowwwwwly.  Very tiny old ladies in big giant cars so big that they can't see over the steering wheel.  You just see this little bit of the top of their heads.  If not for that, it looks like the Oldsmobile or Cadillac is empty, driving itself down the road.  Slowwwwwly.

*  Be nice to young people.  Their hormones are fogging their vision, and life is one big drama after another.  I don't want to be the one to inform them they don't really know anything yet and won't until they hit 50.  Just because they can swim like dolphins means nothing, right?  I just remind myself - as they blur past me - that I'm at least 30 years older and could have swum circles around them in my day.  A little self-aggrandizement goes a long way when you're dragging buckets up and back in the pool.  Yessir, it does.  

*  Someone will discover me and my raw talent someday and I will have my 15 minutes of fame.  That's a good one and gets me through most everything.  I imagine glorious, wonderful, awe-inspiring performance that brings the whole pool to a jaw-dropped standstill.  Heck, not just the pool, the world.

With a virtual bag of tricks I carry everywhere, I can deal with just about anything.  I'm pretty sure all the other swimmers do the same thing.  Then, when the workout is over and coaches have toddled off home, we recount it all in those awesome hot showers for a long time afterwards.  The retelling is pretty close to what happens in the mind, in the pool, in the dark, on cold winter mornings.  Nothing but glory.

A Blaze of Glory: Reward For Hard Work

I had been swimming for over an hour when the world went up in flames.  Or so it seemed.

Unfortunately, a lot about life is actually pretty predictable and even boring.  Life is pleasant here, and I am happy.  But, I don't want to be complacent and ordinary.

That may be one reason I get up early in the morning and shake my own tree, so to speak.  The idea is that you have to find some way to push your own boundaries or challenge yourself or you end up going through life half asleep and dulled, a plodder.  No thank you.

This morning the house seemed cooler than usual.  I went through my routine of preparing to go and then drove across town to the pool.  It feels colder there.  And very dark.  Campus lights don't come on until 6 AM.  The only ones on are at the pool.  As you approach, you see steam from the boiler room  backlit by the floodlights and when the pool covers come off, the pool glows a pale blue.  The pool is a creature unto its own, it seems.  It's old, worn, used hard and very little improvements made to it over its 50 years of existence.  This early morning swimming thing is not for neophytes.  You jump in because you know the pool and how it feels, not because its especially attractive or appealing.  You have a relationship with it, know its quirks, and you begin a sort of conversation with it in a way that's especially noticeable when your vision is limited by the darkness.

This was the last workout of the week, but that does not mean the work was any lighter.  It was, as it has been, meant to build strength.  Hello, tubes and paddles.  Tubes are small inner tubes you inflate and put around your ankles to emphasize stroke faults so you correct them.  That's the hope you have, that the suddenly magnified swaying of your hips from side to side will be much more detectable and you can then correct that.  Easier said than done.  You swim more slowly with tubes on your ankles, and you feel much more of a flopper than ever before.  Today, I flopped a lot.  My pride went and sulked in the locker room while I plodded on, back and forth in my lane.

I was game to do the work and make myself a faster, smoother swimmer, but the truth is I never felt that way today.  I felt tired, slow, hopelessly uncoordinated.  I wondered when the strength would ever show up.  The tubes dig into my skin if I don't have them on just right, and the younger swimmers on the other side of the pool looked ridiculously fast and unconcerned with the myriad challenges presented by using an inner tube on one's ankles at 6 AM in the dark on a cold morning.  What the heck?  I wondered. Why was I going through all this discomfort anyway?  Some questions are better not asked.  Not at 6 AM anyway, in the cool pale steam of a winter morning.

I stuck with the work as best I could, imagining myself finally getting more fit and more capable of doing the whole workout.  It was a mental morning.  The bear was jumping up and down on my back and considering a piano when, eventually, Mark, the coach, took a little pity on me and had me do some breaststroke work.

That felt better.  I had more focus, more interest in the drills and understood the reasons for them.  I thought maybe there was actually some hope for myself in the long run.  Maybe there is a God.

Then I noticed a beautiful thing.  Far over in the east a big heavy cloud formation was lurking ominously.  It glowered and threatened a change in the weather.  I had begun to notice it at about 6:30 and during a break between swim sets.  I looked up without my goggles on and there it was - the blaze of glory - the clouds had turned blood red and were streaked with orange.  A fabulous sunrise was spreading itself from north to south, from the far horizon to overhead and reflecting off the surface of the pool.  It looked like a furnace turned sideways and magnified by a million.  The colors kept changing from crimson to scarlet to vivid shades of orange and then gold-edged fantasy.  A technicolor show on the highest order, and I had paid the admission price.

If I hadn't been up to swim in the cold and dark, I'd have totally missed the entire extravaganza.  I paid with some humbled pride and tired arms and shoulders, but what a way to end the workout, eh?  I'd do it again in a second.

Swim Clinic: Making Friends With Buckets

Last week of swim clinic.  In the pool at 5:30 in the morning.  50 degrees was on the verge of pleasant for early morning pre-dawn; the pool is about 80 degrees.  Once you're in and moving, there's no problem.  Well, that is until you strap on buckets and start dragging them around the pool.  

The bucket is the swimmer's equivalent of a parachute.  The lovely feeling of moving forward in the clear blue water is instantly gone and you are reduced to hamster status.  Humility is a big part of bucket hauling, I've learned.  But, I have made progress.  I've learned that when I'm pulling my dear darling bucket up and back I can imagine how good it's going to feel to go bucket-less in a little whileVery good.  And that's the point.  If you've been focusing  (my biggest challenge in swimming) on the stroke technique the coach has been yelling about up there on the deck, your arms will feel long and strong once the bucket is taken off.

So, okay, it's a white paint bucket, the kind you can buy for a couple of bucks at Home Depot.  You wear a webbing strap around your waist and a buckle or clamp to hold the strap around your waist.  Then, the bucket is attached to a long nylon rope that's attached to your waist belt, and the bucket trails off behind you in the water as you swim.  The buckets are different sizes.  Strong swimmers with lots of experience use big buckets.  Swimmers like me, new to buckets, use smaller ones.  I keep hoping for a coffee mug back there.  It's low tech and very effective.  It slows you way down, makes you feel every little movement of your arms, hands and shoulders.

To get going forward, you have to focus and think.  There are all sorts of cues coaches come up with for how the water is supposed to feel on your arms and all over you as you apply proper technique.  Swimming is all feel.  A coach will say, "High elbows!" or "Early forearm!" or (my personal favorite) "Forget about breathing!"  Counterintuitively, you have to both not think and focus very precisely on your stroke.  If you think too much, you're toast.  If you fail to focus on aspects of your stroke and get mentally lost in space, you may as well be sitting on the deck.  Actually, it would be better to sit on the deck in that case because most likely you are reinforcing old bad habits like slipping elbows, uneven kick, bad head position and on and on.

Swimming is infamously challenging in the same way a golf swing is.  One tiny loss of flow in a golf swing spells slice or hook and you're in the rough, the trees or a water hazard.  Oops.

So, the bucket has to be your friend if you are going to get more efficient and stronger in the water.  Even though swimming looks entirely physical, it is almost all mental.  When you finally have a good day and the whole thing clicks, enjoy it.  And stop thinking about it so you can feel it.  Remember, forget about breathing.  And focus.  Oh yeah, swim fast, too.

Dawn to the Pool

Up at 5 AM for morning swim.  Got my get-ready routine down pat:  Up, dress, fill water bottle, eat small snack, begin to stretch and limber up, gather bag and keys, drive to campus.  Walk over to pool, enter dark cold locker room, leave warm clothes in locker (feeling urge to scream), get in pool.  Yeah, that's it.  Swim, of course.  

Oddly, or not, crackers and raisins are doing the best as a snack before the workout, washed down with water. I'm happy to say I'm still discovering little things like that even now after so many years of swimming.  

Quote of the day from coach:  "Your butterfly looks fine; nothing wrong that a few million laps of butterfly won't cure."

Sigh.  

Best part of swim:  Dawn at the end of the workout.  It's a magical moment that makes you feel both crazy and very privileged.  You've done something challenging, gotten yourself into a position to be able to see one of the greatest free shows available to mankind, and you're nicely relaxed from the exercise.  That is one very specific groove.

A New Dawn: 5:30 Swim Today

In a vein of self-discovery - or rediscovery, which would be more accurate - I got up at 5 and drove over to the college for the 5:30 AM workout.  I hadn't made the effort to get going before dawn in about six or seven years, maybe more.  It felt strangely exciting to do again.  I guess that's a good sign.

The sky is black at 5:15 and it was very cold for our neck of the woods.  36 degrees.  The edges of frost were beginning to cut at living things, put some real teeth into the night.

A pool at 5:30 with the air at 36 degrees looks haunted.  Steam whisps and whorls were rising from the boiler room, the deck and the pool itself.  Two tall light standards flood the area with just enough light, dark enough to focus attention on the pool and swimming.  The locker room is not heated.  That's where it gets a teeny bit challenging.

The water is 79 or 80 degrees, like having Hawaii in the middle of cold winter.  As soon as you jump into the water, you're good.  The coaches, left on deck bundled in parkas and layers of clothes, are the ones who suffer.  That would be Mark Temple and Mary Hazdovac, coaches of Monterey Bay Swim Club.

What I found as I swam was that I felt really good.  I was enjoying the water, the movement, the rhythm of the various strokes.  Moving up and down the lane was much different than in daytime when everything and everyone distracts me from my stroke.  In the dark of predawn, I barely saw the other swimmers in other lanes.  They seemed like phantoms.  I only saw trails of silvery bubbles whirling from the turbulence of their kicking feet or stroking arms.  A flash of an arm whose skin was lit by the beaming light, undulating bodies in the far lanes doing butterfly or turning at the wall to reverse back to the other end.  Quick looks at merpeople, swimmers moving at 6 AM in the wintertime dark.

With nearly all my visual input reduced to my own lane of water and the darkened underwater view of the bottom below me dim and uninteresting, my mind focused easily on the work at hand.  Today, the focus was on pulling drills using drag buckets that emphasize the smoothness of the entire stroke, the symmetry of the pull and recovery.  When you take the bucket off, you feel fast and powerful.  Tomorrow, I won't be feeling so fast.  I'll be feeling sore.  My muscles will adjust, but it's going to take awhile.

By the time the workout ended at 7 AM, dawn was beginning to creep over the far horizon and Venus was dimming in the southern sky, a bright beacon that winked at me.  "Good morning, old girl," I said.  "We're up early, you and I."  The morning light growing in the east was like stage lights coming up on a play.  A sense of anticipation and possibility filled me.  It was simple, beautiful, quiet and I'd missed it all those years.

The showers were hot and breakfast was very satisfying.  I'm still thinking about possible swims, places to travel and challenges for myself.  A dawn morning in winter is an inspiring thing.