Today was a swim day for me – time to get in the pool and knock off some laps.
People often cringe when I tell them I’m a lap swimmer and comment about how boring it must be to go back and forth, repeating those same motions without a background playlist or video. While swimming laps _is_ routine, it’s the lack of stimulation and interruptions that allows me to hear the cues life is throwing at me, the ones that I’ve been ignoring. Underwater the quietness of the pool takes over, truths bubble forth, and my brain is cleaned out. Lumbering slowly along like a manatee, I breathe steadier and more even, and some of life’s rigidity dissolves in the slow lane for a moment of calm.
Most of what I know about swimming I learned during the Red Cross courses I took at camp on Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. Every day during instructional swim I jumped off a dock into frigid cold water and did warm-up “bobs” until my heart recovered, and then yielded to the drills of my counselors until I was ready for the next level of instruction. I would never have guessed in a million years that swimming would later become my go-to sport, and that it would have a re-energizing influence as I age.
Nowadays, after I have finished my swim workout and head to the locker room, I am met by weightlifters, basketball players, and step fanatics. They look defeated and blotchy as if they have been bitten by a South American spider, and they are so tired they can barely get their water bottles up to their lips. They drop their workout clothes where they land and then leave them there until the janitor picks them up with Hazmat gloves and put them in the Lost-and-Found basket. Other men, too tired to make it to the shower, plop down on the end of a bench with a towel on their heads, mumbling locker words. After a couple of hours there, hungry and tired, they manage to limp off to the shower, where they stand comatose until the club closes, or until all the hot water runs out.
Sometimes I try to talk to those athletes, you know, start up some lighthearted small talk about the world, but frankly, I get the impression they wish I would just be quiet and go away. There is no oxygen left in their bodies for conversation, and underneath their sweaty towel, where their faces look as if they’ve been through a medieval battle, they are wishing they never had to return to the gym again. Occasionally one of them will look up and say, “well, I’m glad that’s over,” but their voice trails off at the end as they nod off for an afternoon nap.
I don’t get that kind of vibe from swimmers. Not at all. Lap swimmers come out of the pool looking like their grandmothers just cleaned them within an inch of their lives. They are refreshed and shiny creatures, carefree and almost weightless. Oddly enough, they are also about a foot longer than when they went in, as if each stroke reawakened some muscle group that went to sleep during puberty, as if the lack of gravity and the buoyancy of water completely changed how everything was put together in their bodies.
In fact, most swimmers don’t look like they have any connective tissue at all when they step out of a pool. Amorphous, loose, reborn, they move over the earth on a blue stream of pool gel, which escorts them like a salve throughout the rest of their day. Up top, their hair is slicked back like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and we can tell by the way they use their walk that swimming laps has transported them to another more beautiful space, a land far, far away. Lap swimmers are, in fact, the inspiration for that final scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy says softly, “…and you were there, and you and you, and I love you all so very much, and I’m never, ever going to leave here again, because I’m home, I’m home Auntie Em, here in the swimming pool.”
Dorothy is there because being in a pool reminds her of when she was a kid. In fact, we all see ourselves in the middle of an old home movie saying, “Mom, watch this!” whereupon we hit the water with a square-on belly-flopper that doesn’t hurt at all because, well, it’s water for heaven’s sake! Our bodies are almost all water, so it’s water on water, no holds barred, Cowabunga Man, ain’t it great to be alive!
I took a break from swimming the other day to walk on the treadmill. I almost got run over by something akin to a construction sled bearing down hard on me like an Eskimo in the Winter Olympics. The sled pusher, being yelled at by a personal trainer, was grunting so loud I thought he might be a wild animal, and I watched as he pushed his sled across the finish line, exhale like a jetliner, flex his heavy artillery tattoo, then yell, “WHERE’S MY WATER?!”
I thought of telling him that a refreshing pool was right around the corner, but in my mind, I was escaping in the slow lane, somewhere between lap twenty-three and fifty-seven.