It is 4:30 a.m. The great horned owls outside our home have chosen this hour of day to talk with one another. Sue and I lay in bed in the half-dark listening to them the other morning. We both had smiles on our faces. “It’s amazing,” she whispered.
The birds have far more nuance in their vocalizations than you might think on first listen. Their owl conversations are much more complex than just HOOT HOOT HOOT.
In fact what I head this morning, in my half-awake, half-asleep mode, was something on the order of “Get oooout of beeoood and gooo to Muassters Swim!’
Sue was already dressed and gathering equipment to go swim when I lurched out of bed and shuffled through my little Get Ready For Swim routine. This whole early morning swim thing is still a relatively new activity compared to decades of getting ready for running, which is easy, or to go cycling, which is always a pain in the butt because there is always so much equipment including shoes, helmet, bottles and food to lug around even for an hour ride.
Not so bad
Swimming falls somewhere between the two sports in terms of equipment and preparation. Going to swim would be simple enough if it was just the suit and goggles one needed to go to the pool. Instead, the swim world has invented all kinds of floaty devices necessary to bring to the pool or be deemed a hopeless novice. The pool float I use is a pleasant looking object with two sort of blobby ends, one larger than the other. It is black and white, but many of them are what I’d call “pool blue,” sort is sky-colored with a chlorine tinge.
I don’t yet own a float board, but when I do, I’ll write some motivational words on one side on the order of Jens Voigt and his famous “Shut Up Legs” stuck to the top bar of his bike. On my float board I’ll take a pen and write “Just Don’t Drown.” I’ll admit that Nike will never make that slogan because it seems so damned defeatist at its heart. But you make do sometimes with whatever inspiration you can muster. “Just Don’t Drown” is quite a practical bit of advice.
Somehow the words “Just Do It” don’t seem to apply when you get to the pool. There are so many considerations before you even get in the water. Like, how cold is the water today? So one sits on the edge of the pool with calves and knees immersed while adapting to the water. Of course, you just know it all feels fine once you make up your mind and dive in the water. But those moments between ‘out of the water’ and ‘in the water’ have caused many a swimmer to curse their very existence. Just Do It, indeed.
Cold considerations
During band camp as an elementary school kid our band instructor invited everyone to join the Polar Bear Club and come swim at 6:00 a.m. Always a sucker for doing things that were harder than everyone else, I showed up every morning with my skinny little body shivering in the morning chill. So there’s a long history of early morning swimming in my genes. That’s also why I participated on the Swim Team at Meadia Heights pool. Workouts were held in the mornings before anyone else was allowed in the pool. That made me feel special.
It felt exclusive and real to be let in the pool when no one else was around. Just the call of birds in the trees, and that plain, flat water. And me. It felt that way walking around in my first baseball uniform as well, with cleats clacking on the asphalt. Those sensations meant I was entering a world of sports where what you did was everything that mattered. I loved the feel of that commitment. Which is why I also loved the sound of that pool gate closing behind me. Whatever dread I felt at the prospect of swimming was countered by the feeling that I was part of a group doing cool things.
That’s part of the mental equipment that comes with doing any sport. We may do tons of our training alone, but we also yearn to belong. To earn our place.
I’m still working my way toward the day I can truly swim at the same pace as the other Academy Bullets Masters swimmers. Most have been at this a while and can swim much faster. Today we closed out the workout with a set of twenty 25-yard intervals. It so happened that I did a set of those on my own last week and was able to hit 21 seconds on most of them. But that was with 30-second rests. And I was going all out.
Today we were supposed to do 25 yards and go on the 30s. If you hit 21 seconds you got nine seconds of rest. All the good swimmers were tearing up the water in the middle of the pool while I hung in the outside lane where I always go. I kept up the first interval. And the second. Then I couldn’t go in time for the third. See, I really do believe in the mantra “Just Don’t Drown.” There comes a point in anaerobic work where swimming beyond your pace and capacity to recover presents a genuine risk of sinking to the bottom of the pool. That was me.
I am just not equipped to keep up yet. That will come in time. My 100-meter time is now down to 1:50 from my former best just a month or so ago of 2:10. So things are coming along. My kick is much stronger and Sue has refined a couple elements of my freestyle stroke.
Equipment ready
Rinsing off the chlorine sheen in the shower at home, I stood in the shower contemplating the differences between swimming, cycling and running. Over time, it’s our job as triathletes to equip our brain and bodies to transition between the three disciplines. It may not be possible or advisable in this endeavor to count every step or stroke along the way. That way lies madness indeed. Yet it truly is repetition that gets the job done.
That is true even when you are the last on in the pool when the workout is over. Or perhaps you bring up the rear on the group ride, sucking wheel just to keep up. Or perhaps you’re finishing your last run interval when the rest of the group is sucking water and telling jokes.
Even these experiences are part of becoming equipped to do the sports you love. The main equipment in all three is persistence. That is the most important piece of equipment you have. All triathletes should change their middle name to Persistence.
Or write it on your float board. On the top bar of your bike. Or the palm of your hand when you’re out running. Persistence. It makes winners.
Yesterday morning while running in the dark, I turned my ankle a bit. Kept running with no real consequence. That was no real surprise. Usually, when you turn an ankle or tweak a knee, the true effects don’t show up immediately. It takes a while for any pain to kick in.
Yes, there is emotional pain as well. Pain at having failed in some way. Pain in quitting on a day when we should have (could have?) gone on.
Yes, life is painful. But when you confront that pain and run through it, or cycle up a hill that you never thought you could climb, or pull yourself out of the pool following 3000 meters of hard swimming, life feels easier. You can let down a bit. The pain of everyday life doesn’t seem so bad compared to what you’ve just put yourself through.
This morning I got up and rode the bike on the trainer and watched the news on Good Morning America. The talking heads were pontificating about how Donald Trump has refused to relinquish his Executive Producer role on Celebrity Apprentice or some other “reality show” that does not mean a goddamned thing to the health and welfare of our world and yet this selfish bastard still can’t give it up. He is the most painful, selfish, narcissistic public figure in the history of the universe. Next to Hitler.
This morning was a damn cold run. Yet it was familiar territory.
A couple weeks ago the story broke that the breakfast cereal Cheerios® from General Mills is one of the products in which glyphosate was found in trace amounts. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in a Monsanto herbicide called RoundUp used in agriculture to control or kill weeds. Glyphosate has also been suspected by some of causing cancer.
Ugh. When you consider the fact that toxins introduced into our bodies can disturb cellular activity and kick cancerous cells into gear, it all is enough to make you suspicious of everything you eat and drink. That’s why people are shocked and disturbed by the knowledge the Cheerios are laced with glyphosate. It’s not that people think eating a bowl of Cheerios will kill them. It’s that the cumulative effect of all these chemicals, hormones and other toxins in our environment and our food system is outright disturbing. We have a right to be concerned. We’re swimming in the stuff.
Now there’s a lot of things wrong with this logo. It’s busy as hell for one thing. And it’s rather sexist to boot. But in 1981, this is the kind of thing that was used to market races.
I never bought that line about being calculatedly square even in jest. Who needed that kind of approval to succeed in this world? Perhaps some vain or shallow types. But that whole repressive/regressive/hip conservative schtick was contrived.
Today there is a wake for my late coach Trent Richards. As shared in this blog last week, I met the man when I was only thirteen years old. I recall the world back then as a bluntly mysterious place. I was too trusting of many people, and seemed to know so little about the world at times that I could not help being victimized by my own naivete.
Then came a spiritual and religious journey as well. Because conservatism was so popular in America, and religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell and other TV preachers were leading public dialogue, I wanted to know why and how they thought. Plus I attended a very conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran Church because that was the church in which my wife was raised. And once the wise pastor that married us retired, I sat through inane sermons from arch-conservative pastors who hated on evolution, gays and liberals.
But let us be clear about something. The act of loving another does not mean forgiving their trangressions without admonition or resistance. Jesus did not recoil from calling religious leaders “hypocrites” or a “brood of vipers” when they needed to hear that their methods were not in keeping with God’s promises. Neither did the fiery John the Baptist back off from using the exact same words when religious curiosity (indeed, naivete) brought the chief priests out to the Jordan to witness what John was doing to save souls. “Go away!” the Baptist essentially said. “And only come back if you’re willing to have a change of heart.”
I’m no longer naive the way I once was as a child. As a person ages, one does well to recall the words of 1 Corinthians 13, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”
The remains of that soil is what I ran on last night. So much of it has reputedly blown away over the years, for prairie soils were once feet thick, not just inches. Agriculturalists have only recently taken steps to recognize this loss, and have begun to protect this enormous wealth of nutrients. For too many decades the soil was allowed to blow away or wash away down the rivers, dumped eventually in the Gulf of Mexico or along the banks of the Mississippi. This is the type of tragedy that goes unspoken in our country. So preoccupied are we with our status as homo sapiens that we fail to see the world falling away from us.
This morning I had a great swim at the Vaughn Center pool where we’ve signed up for membership. The facility is just three miles from our house. The pool is ten lanes and has high skylight windows that bring in the sun during an early morning workout.
Perhaps you’re an early riser by nature. Or maybe you have to be an early riser because of your schedule. Or best of all, you just like running in the dark. In every case, it is a unique experience every time you head out the door for a pre-dawn run.
One grows practiced at this mode of running over the years. Running in the dark is both a science and an art. One must learn to trust instinct as well as perception. Of course, it helps to have reasonably strong ankles and knees to handle potential uneven patches in the surface. A bit of balance always helps. All those years of playing basketball and running the steeplechase, playing soccer and football and playground sports come in handy the older you get. But it’s still a dicey proposition sometimes.
