I had meant to free dive today, but after the rain-drenched commute yesterday I bagged, quite unhappily, Monterey Bay for the local workout pool. I had a good session, in the rain, but that's not a kelp forest experience. Oh, and the illustrations will make more sense if I tell you that I swim with mask & snorkel and my dive fins. I swim as a diver now, having hit my limit with regular lap-swimming about a decade ago now.
I miss my full-on pool addiction. As recently as early 2010, I was still swimming almost daily, but wear and tear and serial illnesses--sore throats, flues, and cold after cold--sapped my energy and my compulsion to swim, swim, swim. So, for the first time in years, I barely swam at all last semester, and so gained 20+ lbs (from a skinny, muscled, but unhealthy 155 to a plump, slack-muscled, unhealthy 187). I have kept meaning to return to the pool, but that's hard to do when I couldn't breathe for coughing, and I knew that working out in the cold water just might push me into another lingering illness and I'd been missing too many work-days already. I started erring on the side of caution, and once you break, really break, a routine it's so hard to get back to it.
Simply, I've been happiest in my life when I must swim. Just must.
Such an addiction, for me, is tied to sense of self. When I was a recent college graduate back in the--gasp--80's, I needed an identity since I'd just lost my "student" status. (And, you know, as a student, you can work any job anywhere and no one judges you.) Sheepskin in hand, but allergic to offices and not having a clue about a career, I was working in warehouses and driving delivery vans, and so I reached back to a somewhat neglected love and swam, swam, swam. I was a "swimmer," no matter what I was doing to earn a buck.
Note: At the time, I was also feeling my way into another deep love--genre fiction--which I'd neglected in favor of Literature as an obsessed English major at UC Berkeley. And, I'm proud of the 28 lit courses I took as an undergrad--double the number required for the major, thank you very much--but my time at Cal also had me Gemini-ing my reading life, suppressing my yearnings for popular contemporary fiction even as I reveled in the classics and my eager immersion in the whole heroic tradition of European literature and a special attention to the British (and American) "greats," from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales up through Moby Dick, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Wasteland.
At that time, away from school and not knowing what to do with myself, I took some time off to just read, swim, play ping-pong, and party like a college student (since I'd been working too hard between the classes and the job to pay--no loans, no debt--for college to party when I was enrolled). Then, having spent my meager savings, I took any job at hand: packing clerk in a table linens factory in the Mission, warehouse worker in an electrical supply house in "Point" Richmond (and I put it that way since the company did), driver and then head driver with that same company, and eventual lifeguard and swim instructor for the City of Richmond. I was recruited to teach swimming to children and adults because I spent so much time at the Plunge. And, to tell you the absolute truth, I credit my swim instructor job as having a greater and most positive influence on my classroom teaching of English literature and composition than any part of my experience as a student and later instructor at UCB (aside from the fine example of the enthusiastic Prof. Andrew Griffin).
Anyway, away from school, working, and swimming, I rediscovered genre fiction and contemporary American fiction in general. Jenifer Levin's Water Dancer was an important book to me, for all that it's a rather clumsy first novel. More importantly, Levin wrote one of the best books on swimming, literally, that you will ever find. (*See note below.) That there's a quest motif and two strong characters, the swimmer and the coach, only made that book more significant to me, and that experience with this book solidified my sense that the best literature is not universal, but particular. I needed such a book at that time in my life, and there it was.
The novels of John Le Carre, Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, and Robert Stone also mattered, and those are not merely genre writers. Still, I was making my way back into the mysteries, crime novels, science fiction, and heroic fantasy that I did in fact love deeply.
While I was reading whatever I wanted and swimming before work and during lunch or after work most days of the week, I became addicted to my water-time and my identity as a swimmer. I swam and swam and swam, putting in my miles--my timed miles, for speed--day after day after day. There was an older lawyer who would swim at noon or in the evening with whom I shared a wonderful competitive relationship. We didn't even know each other, never spoke beyond the locker room, and yet if we were in the pool, we'd pace each other, racing for distance. (Occasionally, we'd see the other person coming in and one of us would say, "Let's pretend we aren't here at the same time, okay? I'm not up for racing today." We each respected such a request, for we knew on plenty of other days, we'd be racing lap after lap for 30 minutes or even an hour at a time.) I still recall the day I beat the lawyer, finally able to keep ahead of him lap after lap after lap in one of those workouts that started as casual pacing and then turned into serious racing. He took it hard, harder than I expected, and we never were able to race together again. I pointed out that I'd been pushing myself with two-a-days just to be competitive with him, but having the younger guy finally beat him like that just ruined something. I really missed having such a pacer to help me to push myself. The laps just weren't as much fun for a while there.
(Now that I'm older, I understand how much keeping ahead of the younger ones can matter. Heck, when I was a mere 33, as I say now, and working the summer at the pool again during grad school, I made myself ill not letting any of the younger lifeguards and instructors beat me during training races. They didn't realize there was a real race on, but I was damned if I was going to lose to any of those guys. Seriously, I couldn't get out of bed the next day between the exhausted muscles and the sinus symptoms knocking me down. Lame, but "heroic": to tell you the truth, I wasn't in the best shape at that moment, but that wasn't a good enough excuse not to push myself too far. I miss that sort of drive, sometimes, too.)
I'm not and have never been the fastest swimmer, but I've mostly always swam. My earliest memory is of being in the water at age 2 or 3 with my mother. I swam distance in high school, but I didn't bother going out for the college team. I wouldn't have been fast enough. And yet I am at ease in the water like any true wannabe-fish, and I've put in the time during the best periods of my life. I'm not fast, but I'm devoted, you know? Or, I can be, and that's where the sea-monkey comes in.
Anyway, back in my warehouse and driving days, I swam all the time, and if I wasn't swimming, I was thinking about it. I quit counting laps and started counting miles, counted time spent going back and forth in the pool, any pool.
I started getting a bit obsessed, though I also wasn't interested in competition, per se. I didn't join a Masters team, for as a recent college graduate, I was a bit tired of being told how to do things. Still, I needed to swim.
How can I put it?
If I swam twice a day, I was okay. If I only swam once per day, I was lazy. If I didn't swim at all that day, I was fat.
The pool was closed on Sundays, so that was my official, non-fat day of rest.
And that's my best way of understanding my anorexic friends, by the way, for I had both the obsession and the issue with body fat. (Just a few years ago, I dropped down to 155 or below, and that's just too too thin for a 6-foot man, but I liked how you could see all my muscles, and I was swimming 5 or 6 or even 7 days a week and feeling great with loads of energy . . . .)
At that time in the past, just out of university the first time, I did read my way through all of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee mysteries, finding the old paperbacks in used bookstores throughout Central California (one of the perks of my driving job), which offered me the model of retirement taken whenever a person could afford a piece of it, now ideally, and then back to work until the next flush period of ease. I think I really absorbed my desire for gainful unemployment at this time in my life. No wonder I've embraced teaching with summers off for rejuvenation and immersion in new pursuits. Also, Travis McGee's moral-yet-allergic-to-conventional-thinking character and consequent narrative perspective fed something inside too. Travis McGee is a good man, but don't expect him to work 9-to-5 or to join the country club. Rather, expect him to help out a friend and to act for what's right and fair over what's legal or illegal.
Finally, this morning, I found myself longing for the addiction to training while practicing my underwater laps. I want that sea-monkey on my back. I want to finish my commute with a compulsive longing for chlorinated water and not whiskey-and-water. I can drink the Bushmill's afterwards, as a reward. More importantly, I want to dive and kayak quite a bit this coming spring and summer, so I need to get in shape. As a 50-year-old, I have to work at it a bit more and not just expect being in shape to happen. That's fine. I'm looking forward to the pool work, for I can almost taste the joy and exuberance of being a real working swimmer. I'm a swimmer even if I'm in the middle of the desert, but . . . you know what I mean.
Time to get serious again.
I'm smiling as I type this entry. And my muscles are sore in the best ways.
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*To help you to understand when I say that Water Dancer is a great book about swimming, consider, say, John Cheever's famous short story "The Swimmer" about suburban New England and a man who decides to travel across the county using one swimming pool after another. Despite being included in anthologies of swimming literature, Cheever's short story isn't really about swimming; it's about existential angst and the late 20th-century American suburban male. Levin's novel is about swimming lap after lap after lap, about stroking through open water, crossing miles and miles from mainland to island or up rivers and across lakes, and (not "but") it's also existential in its own way, what with the lesbian main character seeking meaning in life through action.
Seeking meaning in life through action is a fine methodology, by the way.
Get wet!
