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.

Long Cool Bug

Two feet below my nose is a long black bug - like a stretch-limo fly - strolling around on a plant. The bug - iridescent blue and pinched at the waist - can walk around upside down as well as it can right side up. It is possibly the first time in my life I have ever seen such a bug, but I don't think I can remember every bug I've ever seen. It's a cool bug, not the kind that suddenly leaps into my face or chews up my plants. A Johnny Depp bug. A bug, pure and simple.

What strikes me about the bug is that it is going along living its bug life whether I have ever seen it before or not, whether I know what it's called or not.  That I don't understand its life or what it is called doesn't affect the bug.  I watch it, don't feel a need to kill, swat, whack or torment it. I realize that it's teaching me something.

Sometimes I wonder what other people think of me, how they see me, how I affect them.  I even get a little anxious about it now and again.  If they tell me how they feel, I usually believe them, but sometimes I even wonder about that, too.  I actually do things at times so that the person I'm with will approve of me, like me better or think I'm cool. I've probably never been cool, especially since I loved to go to the library and read magazines and books during my spare time at school, and I never jumped off of high places with bungee cords tied to my ankles.  So, being an uncool and quiet person, I wonder what people think of me at times. It has never done me any good to care.

It seems not to matter to the bug. The bug is living a casual bug's routine life regardless of what I think of it or not. I think it's pretty freeing not to care, to be bug-like. I know this begs the question: What if I kill the bug?  Shouldn't it be more concerned?  Maybe.  It doesn't seem to notice me, up in the air above it, 3,000 times bigger than it is, capable of annihilating it.

I have been known to fret a lot about these kinds of things. Does he love me?  Did they like me?  Was I nice enough, smart enough? Did I impress them?  I think that when I just stop caring and become oblivious to judgements by others, I get to the point of being able to walk on a leaf up side down.  Or the human equivalent of that.  I am more likely to reach my potential if I pay attention to what my heart and mind are telling me, pay attention to the truth of the matter, when I walk my walk unconcerned, right side up or up side down.

Just Sayin'

Some people begin life on a dazzling trajectory that never sags into swamps of disappointment or dejection, but most of us swerve and falter a few times once we are shot out of life's cannon.  Things go haywire, we get hurt or sick, we lose loved ones or bad guys really seem to be winning.  Life hurts sometimes.

I've heard that you attract to you that which you believe most sincerely.  I don't know if I'm so convinced this is true.  What I believe is that stuff happens and you had better figure out what to do about it so that you can live on.  And you have to help other people out.  You just do.

I used to be naive and then I became a nurse.  Lots of bad things happen to really good people and lots of good things happen to criminals.  That's the weird thing about life.  Kids get hurt. Old ladies who have done nothing but good all their lives get whacked and then what? Crooks rip people off and nothing seems to happen to them.  Can we really attribute mayhem and chaos to anything but fate?  I don't believe we can.  But I do believe in the goodness of people, or at least the potential for good in people.

The odd thing is I don't not believe in God.  I just don't believe God (or the creative force of the universe) is vengeful or plans things in terms of reward or punishment.  Fate is fate and if you are in line to slip on a banana peel, you have to figure out how to get up.  And I believe that life is better if we lend a hand to others instead of walking past.

It's pretty obvious we're all in this together, and that brings up such mixed images in my mind that I could just scream sometimes.  Then, I think of everything that dazzles and inspires me that people have done and dreamed of, and I want to cheer.
I am not yet a cynical, disappointed, formerly hopeful person.  Too much about life is mysterious and stunning to be cynical. Just sayin', I'm looking ahead, avoiding banana peels to the extent that I can and relieved there are good people in this world.  That's all.  Just sayin'.

Adjusting to Summer Cold

It's really summer now.  Wherever you are, the weather is wrapping itself around you in its own special way. Here, where the  western edge of the Northern Hemisphere is also called California, nothing unusual is going on. No tornadoes, no blazing fires borne on high-speed winds, and no humidity. The nothingness of our summer has settled in.  Come here. Take a break from all that extreme stuff and cool off for a while. We love visitors, especially ones with red sweaty faces and puffy ankles who live in inland areas where it's so darned hot.  I think I remember heat.  And sunshine.  Round bright thing in the sky, right?

I try to explain why we get this gray fog all summer on the coast. Sometimes I make some sense as I try to explain low pressure and high pressure, cold ocean and inland heat. There's no denying that we wear sweaters in the summer and that only ten miles away (6 k for my readers outside the US), the heat is much more noticeable and the summer much more, um, summery.  I have to go there for a summer-weather fix because it sure doesn't come here.

When I was a small child growing up in Carmel Valley - 12 miles inland from Carmel - I was content to remain right where I was. When I looked west in the afternoons, I could see a hideous gray wall of engulfing fog, a misery that made no sense to go near. I spent my summers shoeless and in the pool, chlorinated and tan. The fog bank caused, and of course still causes, an afternoon wind to pick up in inland valleys, but we were protected from it by a weather ceiling that lifted about 6 miles from Carmel in the area called Farm Center (a local's name for a small shopping center).

"Do you kids want to go with me to Carmel today?" my mother would ask entreatingly.

"NO!!!!" would come the instant yell from five throats.  No way, too awful, cold and gray.  I'd always end up shivering and having to wear two layers of clothes at the beach.  Beaches were for idiots as far as I knew, idiots who liked sand fleas, kelp and 50 degree water. I did not buy into the idea that girls wore bikinis to beaches anywhere. It was a lie.

So, here I am living in a place like Carmel, but not as precious as it is or self-indulgent, and I am wrapped in a cold gray expanse of featureless weather all summer long.  Sometimes I can't wait for the summer to pass; it's never short enough now.

So the real question is:  Why do I live here if the summers are so miserable?  I'm making a list of pros and cons, and the cons are starting to make more sense - at least in the summer.  The rest of the year?  That's a different story.

Getting Going

Get out of bed, walk to the kitchen, reach for a coffee mug and fill it with hot coffee. Sit down. Get up again and use bathroom, blow nose, inspect sleep-worn face. Nothing new. Walk back to the kitchen, retrieve coffee mug. Still hot, dear liquid.

Read thin morning paper, growl at sports editor, never prints relevant information about local swimmers, certainly none about the best coaches or team in the area. Whose fault is that? Stare out of window and give the stink eye to the frisky and well-fed crow lining up his rear end over cute little car parked down below on the street. The crow flies away, does not splatter the car this time.

Back to the sports page. Young Irish kid kills the US Open more dead than when Tiger killed it years ago. Phenomenal. Phelps loses 200 Fly by a hundredth. He's tired, not tapered. He'll be a different swimmer in Shanghai. Lots of foreign swimmers at the meet. Aussies, Canadians, Koreans, Mexicans. How many train in the US? Young Canadian team trained here a few weeks ago and then elite group prepping for the meet swam here for three days, long course. Seem to have done well. I want to swim. Can't. Have a cold. Have to get well. Sigh.

Read the weather report.  Sun today, patchy sun tomorrow, decreasing temperatures over the course of the week. Gotta get out into the sun and daylight today. Sun does not make itself known often enough during the summertime on California's central coast.  Read the horoscope:  "Pisces, you may or may not have someone important to deal with today. Best let events unfold before you make any judgements about them. Tonight: Be yourself."  Be myself. Get up and refill coffee mug, get out two pieces of sourdough whole wheat bread. Chew on them, bit by bit. Toast would hurt throat too much. Plain is better. Look for potato chips. Damn, no potato chips. Need salt, need a healthy throat and no more cold. Being sick is the pits.

Make oatmeal. Irish oatmeal, coarse and real. Add honey and a dab of butter. Good with coffee. Nice coffee. Check emails on iPhone. Must answer some soon. Note to self: Remember things.

Clear table, fill sink, squirt dish soap, wash dishes. Grandma did this. Remember the little dish set, a gift as a child, pretending to wash dishes and arranging them this way and that. Bubbles in iridescent mounds that pop softly and reflect the ceiling light, swirling pink and blue glazing them before they explode into exclamation points of wet surprise.

Go out to garden wearing gloves and crocs, carry small trimming clippers. The roses need dead-heading, the alyssum look stressed, and the bougainvillea just will not come into color. Bracts are not forming, looks diseased once again. Time to kill it? Try to revive it again? Stand and water, wipe sweat off face. A horse does not sweat this much; it is not human to resemble a faucet when standing still on a tepid morning.

Pull weeds, haul hose around yard, water all the pots. Riots of color, lots of pruning coming due soon. Plan it, get it done. Sun's overhead, nearly summer solstice. Fine day so far. Sepia memory, dainty curtains over French windows. Willow tree over lawn and sleepy cats stretching, rearranging paws and dusty fur, claws extended and then retracted languidly, sleep overcoming them again. That summer. A brother and three sisters, banging doors, wind chimes tinkling like today. The beginning of something unforeseen and dark.

Kick off crocs, put away gardening tools, squint at sun on flowers, hose snarled in the yard. Fix it later. Fix it later.

Back to the bathroom, use more Kleenex, drink more liquid, time to rest. Small sounds barely heard. Sound is more noticed when it is absent than when it is present, when it is so familiar and so gentle. Open laptop, hear Mac opening chord, read more emails, think about writing. No good. Nothing. Think of exercises learned at writers' retreat. Interrupt own thinking with impulse to get a snack. So that's it. That's the pattern. Fall into the lull, the mental switch from deliberate thinking to free flow.  Or not.  If there's room for writing, writing can happen.

Notice crows cawing outside, glance out window and see crow above cute little car again, aiming. Don't look. Just clean up the mess later, park somewhere else. Devil bird.