The shirt

A last minute call delays me, so I have to burn up the fast lane to the pool. I don’t like to be late, as a rule, but especially in this case. Jared, Judie and Cott usually start our workouts about the same time and we kind of race through our warm-up mile. It keeps us from loafing, which is a natural tendency if you’re thinking ahead to your sprint laps.

Jared has always “won.” He’s less than half the age of Cott or me, but my attitude is always that if I have a lane, I have a chance. I won’t use age as an excuse. No one knows Judie’s age, nor has the nerve to ask. We’ve guessed somewhere between 40 and 55. She’s whipcord taut, which would put her at the lower end. But, sometimes she’ll mention something that indicates she’s been around longer.

I jump into the suit and head for the pool. I’m already almost hyperventilating from blasting my psyche-up music in the car and am ready to tear it up.

Damn! I round the corner and see the three of them sitting on the bench. This means, the water aerobics class before us is running long. All revved up and nowhere to burn.

I join them on the bench to wait. Judie says she has something for me and disappears into the women’s locker room. She comes back with a bag and holds it out. “This is for that favor you did for me last week.”

It wasn’t that big of a deal. But, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. It’s a humorous t-shirt. “Ten Reasons Why I Swim.” None of them are serious.

“None of them are serious,” observes Cott. “It’s missing number one for us geezers.”

Jared bites on that. “What?”

“Pumps the blood and oxygen through everything. Keeps you hornier than a three-pecker goat.”

“A three-pecker goat?” Jared raises his eyebrows at me.

I shrug. “He’s from Oklahoma. I think they’re indigenous to there.” Another high and inside fastball for poor Jared.

“I know what he means, but I don’t think it’s the blood flow,” interjects Judie. “If I’m busting my tail to keep my body in shape, I want to show it and I want to use it.” There were a few moments of silence where we contemplated our interpretations of that. “What’s your reason, Henry?”

I was thinking it’s because years of destroying my joints have left me with the choice of swimming or aerobic blinking for a workout, but it didn’t seem to rank up there with the previous entries. “I just like to smell like chlorine.”

The class breaks up and we begin our laps. I hit my rhythm and start pondering the question.

Yeah, there’s all the benefits of being in shape. But, it’s something more than that.

Maybe it’s because there’s always a new frontier to challenge you. Swimming is about technique as much as strength, endurance and tenacity. There’s always an opportunity to improve.

When I began this latest skein of swimming workouts, I searched some articles on workouts and stumbled across one on freestyle technique. When I learned to swim, one thing that was stressed was minimizing body rock. This article had the new slant. You get your body muscles into it.

I found this fascinating. Humans have been swimming for what, five or ten thousand years? And, someone still hurdled conventional wisdom and came up with a better way? Inspiring.

It took a little while to master this, but it chopped a few minutes off my mile. There’s some elation in climbing to a new plateau. A friend of mine recently had a breakthrough in her kayaking skills and couldn’t wait to email me about that. The jubilant words practically leaped off the screen.

Buoyed by this conquest, I took on my old nemesis, the butterfly. Actually, it’s a nemesis to most people, demanding very high levels of timing, form, strength and endurance. A lot of medley swimmers hate to practice fly. I revisited it with a vengeance and banged away relentlessly in almost all my sprint laps. Cott and Judie would exchange glances and shake their heads. Flyers are the berserkers of the pool.

It’s a killer. It quickly saps your strength and oxygen, which destroys the form you need to maintain the necessary momentum. Everything goes to hell pretty quickly.

But, the payoff finally came. One day, everything clicked. I felt like I was flying across the surface of the water. Elation. The knowledge your can do anything if you set your mind to it. That’s why I do this.

Hear the splashes getting closer, Jared? I’m comin’ for ya, buddy.