We pause from our regular Friday style of yearbook posts because I have to take and edit the photos that we’ll feature in that next installment. But, since we completed our glance of 1944 last week, we’ll give 1955 a cursory look starting in a week or two. Which also gives me time to update the archive on 1944. That’ll be done by the time I end this post, just you wait and see.
(Or see right now. Our casual glance of the 1944 Glomerata is now live in the Glomerata section. You can also see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful book covers, go here. The university hosts their complete collection here.)
Anyway, another gray day here. Some rain. Outer bands of the remnants of the big storm that landed on Florida and did a slow motion burnout on Georgia and South Carolina coastline.
It was windy, just another afternoon of 25 mile per hour gusts, and a lovely persistent rain that made you wonder why you weren’t spending the time in a good book.
I can’t tell you how often I wonder that these days, no matter what the weather is.
Finally, I figured, at that point where the afternoon turns into evening, that if going outside meant getting wet, I could spend the time doing laps.
And this is that story.
The first 700 yards or so were a little clunky. Each of the pool was an opportunity to ask myself, “Why are you doing this to yourself?” It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good. Good for me, I should say. Quality is a unique and relative condition, and you never see that distinction quite so clearly as you do in things you do poorly, but you’ve been able to distinguish your own improvement. And if you’ve ever done that think next to people who are among the best in the world at it, you understand the level from which you begin, so that you more keenly discern the .28 percent improvement you might make over time.
So the first 700 wasn’t good for my normal meager abilities, and I knew it. But after that my arms or my legs or my lungs or my mind, or some combination of them, all finally slipped into gear and it became a good, for me, swim.
And so it was that I breezed past 1,000 yards, didn’t even really notice anything on the way to 2,000 yards, and, suddenly, I was at 3,000 yards.
“Suddenly,” also being a relative term and, in this case, one concerned purely with perception rather than pace.
I learned something about swimming, or myself, or about my swimming today. I can’t write while I am doing laps. I do a lot of sentence and thought forming, emails, lectures, you name it, while I am just going about my day. This is my process. When I sit down to actually type things it becomes an exercise of recall and, sometimes, actual editing.
But in the pool, I’m busy counting laps. I repeat the lap number over and over, with every left-hand stroke. “Forty-one, 41, 41, 41.” There’s nowhere in there that I could get out more than the two main points of something I am mulling over right now, lest I lose count.
Was I on 41 or 43?
And, yet, somehow, I don’t even notice the middle third of a swim as I plod my way through it.
Anyway, I got in 3,520 yards this evening. That’s two miles to you and me.
On the other hand, I wasn’t tired or sore, after, which helps to explain the incredibly slow pace of it all, I am sure.
The sky above, after it stopped raining, looked like that. This system broke up a heat wave, gave us some rain and now it will have the courtesy to move on out of here. We’re expecting sunny and mid-80s through the weekend and beyond.
Let’s see how we handle all of that.