I still feel so exhilarated when I  get to go swimming!  Even when every stroke feels more sluggish than the last one.

Today was one of those days.  I felt my dinner weighing on my stomach even at 6:30 AM when I took to the pool.  It didn’t help that the pool was so crowded that my daughter and I shared a single lane.  I hugged the wall so tough that I even hit the ladder on my flip turn.

I did manage to swim 1200 yards overall, though, and I swam my second IM faster than my first.  My IM times were:  2:50.60 and 2:48.08.  I was feeling triumphant shaving my time like that!  I felt so good that I gave my daughter my watch, (and her goggles, which I now use), and told her to time her IM while I did my cool down lap.  Mind you, she hadn’t planned on swimming an IM.  Chilling is her MO in the pool these days.  But she swam a 100 IM faster than I swam a 50 elementary back.  Her time?  1:33.83.  I have no idea how competitive that is with serious swimmers.  But compared to me?  Get outta here!  I love to have that time to motivate me.

I am reminded that every swim workout (for me, at least) is actually swim practice.  I am practicing my strokes, modifying here and there, working on being consistent, shaving seconds or strokes every chance I get.

One thing I definitely need to practice is flip turns.  I am no good at them.  I usually panic and avoid them altogether, but today, I forced myself to practice them.  At one point I found myself thrashing around, inhaling water as the result of pulling out of a flip turn too soon.

It reminds me of my days as a music major.  A music major must spend hours a day practicing, and the practice area consists of hundreds of tiny rooms adjoining each other.  It is impossible not to hear the person in the room on either side of you practicing.  I was always scared someone was listening to me, critiquing my skills.  Then, one summer, I got a job at the school, and had an office in the practice room area.  I heard this horn player working on the same solo over and over.  I started wondering if he knew that everyone had already heard his solo ad infinitum.  Suddenly, it clicked for me that he was only concerned with refining his performance, not whether someone was listening!

The same is true in the pool.  As much as I worry that everyone is watching me and laughing, it’s more likely that no one is paying me any attention.  They are busy following their own black line at the bottom of the pool.  Not even my own daughter, sharing a lane with me, noticed everything I was doing.

So, self consciousness is no excuse for not learning flip turns.

Now, fatigue, on the other hand. . .

The last couple of times I’ve been swimming, I’ve had my oldest and youngest daughters tag along.  The oldest, because the youngest won’t sleep all the way through like she used to.

I had hoped in the back of my mind that it would make my oldest want to get in the water again.  After all, she’d put in years swimming on  a team, and I thought somewhere deep inside, she missed it.

I was right.  After watching me swim a couple times, she was itching to get back in the pool.  So this morning, we left the baby home with her big brother, and we two went swimming.

Now you know from last week, I can’t help but race the person in the lane next to me—unless it’s my daughter.  Oh my goodness, she swims so fast.  At one point, during my first IM, she beat me getting down the pool on a kickboard(!) versus my butterfly, my fastest stroke!  My times were slower today, too.  My first IM clocked in at 2:50.30, and my second one at 2:57.20.  I did notice that I’ve managed to shave one stroke off my backstroke, meaning, it used to take me 18 strokes to get to the flags, and now I can get it done in 17, so I should see better times soon I hope.

My daughter borrowed my watch to time herself swimming a 25 free.  She swam it in 17.68, which is faster than her old time of 18 something.  I don’t expect her to get back into competition anytime soon (I wish), but she is interested in lifeguarding, so that’s good.  She could swim the 500 yards necessary for lifeguard training in her sleep.

In the meantime, I’m working on my 10,000 hours.  That’s the time Malcolm Gladwell calculates it takes to master something.  At the rate I’m going, it’ll be a while.

But then I think about the older people going back and forth in the pool.  Most of them look like they’ve been swimming their whole lives.  They have the whole bouyancy thing down.  They don’t have problems with breathing, and their stroke looks good.

I don’t think I’ll run out of time.  And I’m sure having fun along the way.

When I got to the pool yesterday, I saw my friend Stephani in the lockeroom.  She had just finished her workout.  She told me that she wanted to tell Vince, my kids’ former swim coach that she had actually swum 26 lengths in her triathlon.  I asked her if Vince were her coach, and she told me that she had signed up for swimming lessons with him in October.  She had been in class with 5 year olds, but rather than be humiliated, she wanted to glean everything she could from the great coach Vince Gallant.  I’m sure he would be proud of her accomplishment.

Stephani has the gleam in her eye that you get when you’re hooked on swimming.  She wondered, “What took me so long?”  I know what she means.  Her husband has a bad knee.  Now he swims with Stephani.  He also wonders what took him so long.

She is a mother of 2 in her 40s, and she looks great!  I see older people in the pool every time I go, and on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I see the young swim team practicing.  Message?  It’s never too late to start swimming.  (starting early doesn’t hurt, either)

So I hopped in the pool, determined to add to my yardage.  It felt good at first, but I felt that shoulder burning halfway into my set.  Even though I know my ultimate goal is to swim straight freestle, I train as though I am going to compete in the IM.  I am really fascinated with swimming four strokes in that combination!  I timed both of my IMs this time, and was a little slower than last time.  The first time was 2:47.68, and the second one was 2:50.52.  I thought a third would be even slower, but didn’t care to find out.  By then, the shoulder was pretty hot, so I just stayed in the water until I had swum 1100.

I have increased my freestyle yardage and decreased my recovery stroke yardage.  I’m inching towards my goal. I’m sure I’ll be wondering what took me so long by the time I reach it.

So I went swimming today.  And like I do to psych myself up to go in there, I looked to see how many people were in the pool before I went in the locker room.  I saw two black people in the pool, maybe three.  I wondered if I knew who they were.

When I got to the pool, I saw that the man was my friend Stephani’s husband, and, one lane over, I saw Stephani!  And she had just competed in her first triathlon.  Which I was supposed to go and cheer her on, but I hadn’t put it in my calendar, and therefor, I forgot–until the moment I saw her in the pool.

“Hey!  How’d it go?” I asked her.  She told me that she was disappointed in how she’d placed.  She was surprised at how competitive she was.  I empathized, agreeing how hard it is to swim next to someone without racing them.  We stopped talking, and she finished her set.  I started mine, and even though I tried not to, I couldn’t help racing her.  Even after we had talked about it.

She climbed out, and I got to work.  It was Wednesday, so I expected the Y swim team to join us and kick me out of my lane.  They were later than I had expected, but they did indeed come, politely asking me to move down a couple lanes.  I was in the middle of my third 100 set.

That race in my warmup set my pace.  I timed my first IM at 2.44.00.  That is the fastest I have swum it.  I didn’t want to erase that time.  I didn’t want to jinx it, so the next IM I swam, I not only didn’t time it, but I also intentionally swam it slow and sloppy.  My left shoulder was still bothering me from my last swim, so I didn’t push myself more than 1000 again.  I hope to swim again on Friday, increasing my yardage.

I got to go swimming again this morning!  I peeked at the pool before going in the lockeroom.  There was one person in the double-wide slow lane.  Cool, I thought.  Except by the time I got to the pool, there were two people swimming in the slow lane.  No problem, I thought.  I’ll swim between them.  And we were swimming along just fine, when an older man walked over to the pool.  He stood outside looking as we swam back and forth.  Then, he got in the pool.  And stood at the wall for a while.  I hesitated when I got back to the wall, and he told me we had to swim circles, and he proceeded to swim behind the woman on the right side of the lane.  I told the woman on the left side of the lane that we were going to swim circles, and she said, “Oh, I’m done after this next lap,” and she swam straight forward.  I contemplated waiting for her to finish and decided against it.  Something about aerobic fitness or something.  I followed the old man, and I saw him nearly collide with right lane woman.  She didn’t swim in circles.  At all.

Meanwhile, I noticed that left lane woman was out of the pool, so I tried to get in her lane.  Only to be cut off by old man.  So I treaded water for a bit and then decided to go back to the middle of the lane.  When I reached the shallow end, I informed the old man that the right lane woman had left.  He was thanking me when I pushed off the wall again.  I was pretty ticked about the whole incident, but I didn’t want to lose aerobic whatever.  (love how I’m so technical?)

Old man didn’t stay in the pool too long.  A whole lot of trouble for two minutes in the pool, I thought.  But, hey!  I had room to stretch out!  And soon thereafter, the swimbot on the right side of the lane got out, too.  Woo-hoo!  I had the whole double-wide lane to myself!  And to celebrate?  I did an IM.  In the 800th set.  (This means I was over 800 yards into my workout).  My time, 2.53.74, was 12 seconds quicker than my last time on the IM on Tuesday.

Needless to say, I was thrilled.  My total for the day?  1000 yards.

I have a dream.  That dream is to one day compete in triathlons.  Of course, I at first just want to take part in triathlons, but the ultimate goal would be to actually be competitive.

I should maybe learn to run, huh?  I would also like to have some of the children compete in triathlons.  That’s just one reason I signed my 8 year old daughter up for Girls on the Run (GOTR).  We meet twice a week to train for a 5k in May.  This daughter is not much for running–unlike her other 3 sisters!  So she needs quite a bit of encouragement, namely in the form of my running alongside her cajoling her every step of the way.

But I’m 42, with a history of knee injury and sciatic nerve problems, so this is just big happy fun for me.  Did I mention that I’m quite a bit overweight?  Yeah.

What this means for swimming is that my left knee has been perpetually sore since starting GOTR approximately a month ago.  For those of you following at home, I basically replaced my neck pain (from the 200 sit-up challenge and tae bo) with the knee pain from running.

And swimming again serves as rehab for me.  So, while I, to my great disappointment didn’t swim the elusive  mile, I did feel much better when I got out of the pool.

I ended up swimming 900 yards, or half a mile, my knee hurting at first.

Today I also took my oldest and youngest daughters with me.  Youngest daughter, at 12 months, just won’t sleep peacefully at home while I jump up to go swimming at the crack of dawn.  So, I took her to the pool along with a babysitter.  I had an ulterior motive.  My oldest daughter has great swim technique.  So she gave me much wanted feedback on my strokes.

She says I bend my arms too much on the freestyle, and my back and breast strokes look good.  My butterfly?  Looks weak and sorry.  My abs haven’t yet recovered from the last baby.  Hence, the 200 situp challenge. . .

My times on my IMs were also slow:  3:03.02 for the first one, and 3:05.24 on the second one.  Then I decided that the butterfly was too rough on my knee and stuck with flutter kick strokes.

As always, the whirlpool hit the spot after the workout.  I hope to return to the pool with my girls on Thursday.