Swifter, Higher, Stronger, Clutz-ier

In honor of the Olympics . . . well not really, I just happened to start swimming laps this week. Several things prompted this . . . #1 I have quite a few friends who enjoy working out this way and hearing them talk about it made me want to try it. #2 I have an LA Fitness membership that needs to be taken advantage of. #3 We have spent a lot of time in the pool this summer, but with three girls to supervise, I haven't had a chance to swim just for me. #4 I swam quite a bit growing up and was fairly good at it.

So Wednesday of this week I began. I brought my new $3.99 goggles and the swim cap that Sarah and I will take turns using. I looked official. Then I got in the pool and all that changed. I took the last of four lanes available. During my swim, I looked over the other people swimming - fancy girl right next to me swam beautifully, stretched on the side of the pool with flexibility I will never know and looked like she had a very fine-tuned workout with a variety of strokes and paraphernelia. There was an older lady next to her, surely I could do as good as her, I was younger. And some guy on the far end who went back and forth with hardly any breaks. Well, he was a guy, athletics come more naturally to them.

I began my first lap, freestyle. That's a funny word to describe the stroke I was doing. I knew in my mind what freestyle was supposed to look like, but what my body was doing felt like what I imagine a gorilla or a giraffe would look like if they had the misfortune of finding themselves in a large and deep body of water. There was lots of splashing legs and arms everywhere and excessive gasping for air and coughing. I was worried that some of my com padres might worry I was drowning on my first 1/2 lap. I stood up halfway across the pool with a whole new reality. I stink at swimming. I had been so naive thinking I could just hop in the pool, after about 20 years of not swimming any laps, and just take to it like a fish. I had been cocky and thought because I was younger and less overweight (overweight, but less overweight) than many people I'd seen do this sport, I figured it couldn't be that hard. Ha. I was put in my place - swimming is hard work.

I continued to try to save some face - I didn't want to get out after my 1/2 lap of embarrassment, I still had a little bit of pride left. But not to worry, the rest of that was stripped away before I would exit the pool. So I caught my breath and went back to the front crawl. I breathed every other stroke and still felt like I couldn't get enough air. I realized that maybe I had a little bit of fear of being under the water. I panicked a little and I think my nervousness was adding to my breathing problems. At the end of my first lap - yep you heard it right - FIRST lap - uno, one, a single lap - I was coughing and sputtering on the side of the wall. What did I get myself into? And what about all that running I have been doing - hasn't that increased my endurance?

I continued to swim, not noticing much improvement, but switching to strokes where I could keep my head ABOVE water - like the scissor-kick, a personal favorite. (o: Why don't they have that stroke in the Olympics? Probably because it would take an hour to complete a hundred meter event. The stroke I did most of the time though, was the backstroke. I felt the least embarrassed when I did this one. My arms moved around and around like a windmill. I'm pretty good at floating on my back and I could breath except for the occasional times when water splashed over my face. Yes, the backstroke was my stroke of the day! I did have some issues with going straight and imagined myself zigzagging in my lane to the point of going twice the distance in one lap, but it didn't matter. I was getting exercise, not looking as dorky and I wasn't drowning.

Then in walked my new friend. "Hey, can I share the lane?" Oh crap. How could I share a lane when I was barely keeping myself contained in a whole lane with my zigzag backstroke? "Sure." I said - what else was I going to say? Then I admitted that it was my first time trying out swimming (everyone else probably thought, "Really? We couldn't tell") and how do you share a lane? I felt totally dumb asking this, but felt it was better than crashing into the guy. He informed me that we each stayed on one side of the blue line in the water. No problem. He was nice and tried to tell me he was fairly new at swimming too as I looked at him through my new goggles. Later, I discovered that my new goggles still had their film over them that protects them from getting all scratched in the store. Each sticker had a cartoon picture of a hand peeling the film away. So there I was explaining, "This is my first time doing laps here" looking through my goggles with the animated stickers covering my eyes. I'm sure it was all this guy could do to keep from laughing. But I have to say, once I got rid of those annoying stickers I could see a LOT better! Who knew?

So I continued, I didn't give up. I tried doing freestyle again so I could keep track of where I was in the lane better. I went a whole lap this time, but coughed and gagged and burped up air bubbles at the wall. Yeah, I was pretty cool. My survival instinct kicked in and I chose the good old scissor kick going back. That was too exhausting to keep up so I went back to my backstroke routine being careful to hug the wall and control the zigzag effect. I don't know how many laps I did backstroke, but in the half hour of swimming I did this stroke about 2/3 of the time.

I was finished - a half hour was reasonable and I was proud of myself for sticking with it - embarrassments and all. As I went to get out of the pool I had a shocking realization. My legs were jell-o and my arms could not lift up from my sides more than about 5 inches without excruciating pain. Again, to save face, I walked and acted as smoothly as I could without falling on my face. Reaching up to get my towel off the hook I wanted to cry out in pain, but I bit my tongue. What in the heck was wrong with me? My arms hurt like they've never hurt before. I don't remember my anatomy well enough to tell you what exact muscle was in such pain, but it was the underarm muscle that you see flapping around on old ladies (and me too) when their arms are lifted up. I thought all my weight lifting I did with Gilad on FitTV was strengthening these muscles?? I guess not.

Everything hurt that morning - washing my hair, getting peanut butter out of the cupboard, steering the van, everything that required any arm movement. The girls laughed at me when we came home and I tried to stretch out the muscles to relieve the pain. I cried out as I stretched - Oh MAMA it hurt, but it helped.

Later that day, I told a friend about my experience. Through her laughter she offered to meet me the next day and help me out. Thanks Missy! It was a MUCH better experience. For one thing, it was just the two of us in the pool for most of the time. Missy reviewed the breast stroke with me and we talked about breathing. Plus, this time I stretched first. I was not as nervous having a whole lane and a nice friend beside me that would laugh with me and not at me. (o: I coughed and choked just a few times my second day and actually had a good experience. I still have a LONG way to go, but maybe there is a future for me and swimming. Besides falling and slipping on the floor as I got out of the pool - why can't I just be cool for one day??? - day two went a lot better.

My previous thoughts of thinking I was a good swimmer all these years make me laugh. When a friend invited me to participate in a triathlon last month, swimming a mile in a lake didn't scare me at all. The running did. I think of what might have happened if I had been crazy enough to do it. My body would be laying at the bottom of Hagg Lake for sure. How could I have been so naive? Now the swimming part - in an open lake, no less, not a pool with clear, clean water and a bottom and sides - terrifies me. Running - no problem - you have all the air around you that you want. Nobody drowns running. Not that I know of anyway. But if anyone could figure that one out, I bet I could.