Small swimming triumph — I can now lap swim well enough (age 52) that I am only a little anxious about doing circle swimming when the pool is crowded enough to require it.
This is kind of a big deal, because while we bought our house in part because the YMCA is less than a block away, the Y has pretty restricted swim times, and they fill up. So fairly often, all four lanes will have 3 people in them. When it’s 1 person, you get a lane to yourself. When it’s 2 people, you split the lane, which is easy enough.
But when it’s 3, you switch to swimming in long circles (loops) inside your lane, which can create anxiety about not swimming fast enough and getting people mad at you. (Similar to the anxiety I sometimes feel biking in traffic, when in theory, I’m allowed to be in the same lane as the cars, but I don’t bike that fast…)
In actuality, the people at the Y are generally very nice, and if you do need to swim slower, the better swimmers adapt. I still have pretty poor cardio conditioning, so at the end of a lap, I often need to rest and catch my breath at the end of the lane, and if someone fast is coming up, I’ll wave to them to go ahead and pass me, and that works fine.
And if you go in the 10:15 a.m. slot, it’s mostly older folks who are particularly patient and encouraging. One of them told me this week that I swam beautifully! I had to laugh, because I do not. Sweet of her to say, though. And an older man said, as I was gasping and catching my breath at the end of the lane, “That was me a month ago!” And then he flipped and stroked powerfully away. So charming. I’m shifting to the 9 a.m. slot next week, but I’ll miss these folks.
I used to be such a poor lap swimmer that I just didn’t feel comfortable with trying to circle swim at all — it was one more thing to keep track of, and a socially awkward thing at that. My swimming has gotten smooth enough now, though, that I can pretty much just do it, with only a tinge of anxiety.
Thanks again to Amanda Daly for the swim lessons that helped me learn to actually swim the freestyle stroke (in my mid-40s), rather than just staying sort of afloat in the water, mostly on my back. (Swimming on your back is also much tougher for lap swimming, since you can’t see as well where everyone else in your lane is.)
I’m now up to swimming 3 days / week, and my goal is to get to 5 days / week two weeks from now, and then hopefully, keep it up for the rest of my life. (It’d be daily, but it’s particularly hard to get swim slots at the Y on the weekend, since a lot of the time is turned over to family swim, which I can’t complain about!)
I guess this is also just a plug for swimming — exercise that you can do lifelong, that’s less likely to cause injuries than running, that can save your life, that is good for helping to manage ADHD (studies show!), and that is a really good time to work out story problems in your head. 🙂
(Not my pic — I think it’s a royalty-free one, though.)