Swimming

This is the swimming pool in our subdivision at about 7am on a weekday. I swim here once in a while and I have never ever seen anyone in this pool before work. Unlike the local YMCA in the US, there is no crowded time or sharing of lanes. You can swim diagonally across the pool or just spend a few minutes before work doing cannonballs if you want.

I think running is boring but swimming is boring². It’s like running with no Ipod in an endless monochrome tunnel. Plus you get wet. Jenny, who was a big swimmer growing up in the East Bay area of San Francisco where competitive swimming is pretty popular, says that I’m missing the point since it’s a good time to think – aerobic exercise with an enforced zen state. Now I’m no enemy of Eastern mysticism, but it just doesn’t work that way for me. You can’t even talk to yourself. I suppose you can in your head, and while that may make you look less crazy, I have always found imaginary conversations in which you impress your boss or friends with your razor sharp wit to be much more satisfying when conducted orally.

Jenny always accuses me of having this sour grapes attitude because I’m a bad swimmer. I don’t disagree. Its not that I can’t swim, but I apparently look weird doing it. Once I got the basics down at the age of 5 or 6, I never really had any further lessons, let alone a critic of my swimming form. I apparently pull harder with one arm than another. This doesn’t surprise me. When I first moved to South Beach in 1999, I’d go down to the beach once in a while to swim in the morning before work. I would set out to swim parallel to the beach for a few blocks, but after a few minutes of chugging along in my goofball style, I’d pop my head up and find out that I was further away from shore and headed in the opposite direction. I was swimming in circles, which makes sense if you’ve got one strong arm. Since I turned 12 and got bored of swimming in our pool, most of my swimming time has been limited to the swimming that goes on in surfing. That’s a different kind of swimming since you have a wetsuit on, which sort of floats you, and you’re tethered to your board by a leash. Surfing swimming is alternately mellow as you drift around during dull flat water intervals or a frantic survival effort as you try paddle to avoid getting smashed by big wave whitewaters, which, if not avoided, give you a good feel for what it must be like to be a dirty sock inside of a washing machine.

Here I mainly swim in the pool before we go on a vacation to a place where I can go surfing, which since our move to China has been a surprisingly large number of places. If you don’t do this as an almost 40 year old, I find that your upper arms just get killed, even on a very long board. So, just as I floss pretty regularly about 2 weeks before a dentist appointment to avoid the wrath of the hygienist, I swim for about 2 weeks before a surf opportunity to minimize the dirty sock in the washing machine treatment.