full fathom five

Swimming and Dogging Discoveries

I've at last happened on a way to coordinate my limbs while swimming.  It doesn't seem to add to my speed (I'm still getting passed quickly by all swimmers in neighboring lanes), but there's a rhythm to it that makes me feel I'm on the right track.  Here's how it happened.

I'd reported awhile back that I was tilting forward when I did the crawl, with head underwater and feet above water on the kick.  I asked one of the life guards if she had any tips on how to level out.  She watched me for a couple of laps and said that I wasn't keeping my legs straight as I kicked, that I was bending my knees, which brought my feet above water to make a splash-kick (which isn't as fast or efficient as kicking underwater). 

Since then, I've been trying to keep my knees locked as I swim, only bending the leg to do a scissor-motion at the hip-joint.  That's made me newly aware of my legs, their power to propel me through the water.

Meanwhile, a friend told me about his personal trainer's method of making clients push themselves to failure in order to stimulate the growth of muscle.  He has people do three sets of lifts, either with free-weights or on machines: the first set (of 15 or so reps.) is to warm up and this can be with less weight than you know you can lift, the second to lift your normal weight, and the third with a bit more weight than you've ever lifted, and you lift until you can't lift anymore.  So if you're lifting sets of 15 repetitions, and you have to stop at 9, this is good.  You've achieved the goal of stimulating your muscles to grow more to correct the deficit.  My friend says he can really see and feel the difference, and he's built up muscle relatively quickly.

So, because I wasn't doing anything to build muscle (I'd given up lifting weights for swimming - which just builds aerobic capacity and tones muscles), I figured maybe I could stimulate some muscle growth as well if I sprinted every other lap or so.  I tried it, could only make it half a lap - with two long, slow laps in between.  

But these sprints yielded rewards. I discovered that if I gave a strong, stiff-kneed kick as I stretched my arm out as far as it would go, I could take a bigger stroke.  It felt like I was taking a bigger bite of the pool with each stroke, and gave a sense that legs and arms were working together.  I found that my limbs fell into rhythm with my exhalations, and I had a new sense of my body tilting slightly in the direction of each arm as it stretched to slap the water, adding a cylindrical sense of buoyancy.    

I've been surprised that this new motion hasn't reduced my total workout time.  But that's okay; it feels efficient and when I do a kick turn at the end of each sprint, there's a refreshing effervescence on my face as I swim back through the bubbly wake.  

***     

Another pleasant sensation I've discovered this summer is on our weekend visits to the local dog park.  I used to think the great draw of these outtings was watching the dogs cavort through the woods and fields, but now I'm increasingly fond of the slow walk and idle chat with the pack of humans.  It's oddly comforting to move through nature with a group of people, and it occurs to me that this might have something to do with genetic memory embedded in us from the times when humans migrated in tribes.  Our dog-park has trails through woods where we can walk ten abreast, and sometimes we'll meet a group of cross-country runners approaching.  We'll stand aside and watch them go by, and they look surprisingly natural in the setting, bunched up together for easy communication.  In fact, when one of them or us peels off from the group on our own, it looks odd and inappropriate.    

Swimming II

During all the years I taught Creative Writing, there were always students who questioned my advice to write from their own experience because, they said, their lives were too boring to write about.  I'd tell them that a good writer can make anything - even pocket-lint - interesting.  Well, here goes.  I'm going to practice what I preached by telling you about bathing-cap fabric and bathing-suit elastic.  But first, some background (ahhh, a reprieve!).  

    My husband and I were at the dog-park a few weeks ago, and as we walked with the human pack following the dog-pack, we found ourselves drifting into gender groups.  A man had been talking about changing his doorknob and not being able to find the right screws, so we women fell back as the men gravitated to him, giving him advice.  We commented on the chains of events these projects inevitably spawn to eat up your weekend.  I told them about how my husband's preference for motors in any yardwork we do, can be a super time-waster - how we'll be picking up brush and walking it to the brush pile, and Win will say, "Wait, I'll get the tractor and trailer to haul it," and by the time he drives into town to fill the fuel can to gas up the tractor and/or buy new spark-plugs and/or oil the trailer-hitch, I've already finished the brush-hauling by hand.  The other women added examples that got us on the subject of the latest gadgets, how husbands like experimenting with them while we just want to get the job done as simply as possible.  I mentioned how I wouldn't even try out the bathing-suit drying machine in the locker rooms of the YMCA where my husband and I now swim.  Win had marvelled at it and told me to try it, but I told the women that I didn't want to create another new habit that stretched our long carbon footprint even more by using a ton of heat.  I said I was fine wrapping my wet bathing suit in a towel and taking it home to hang on the clothesline.  One of the women corrected me, saying the machine used no heat, only centrifugal force.  "It just squeezes the water out of the suit," she said.  "I love that machine," and then she went on to tell me that as a single mom with four kids, she wasn't going to let anyone make her feel guilty about using time-saving devices like clothes driers, hair driers, etc., even if they were energy hogs.  I apologized and said I was just talking about us, Win and me, and hadn't meant to preach, and we proceeded amiably from there.

   But learning that the bathing-suit squeezer didn't use heat intrigued me, so I tried it out.  And got quickly addicted.  It added to the luxurious ritual of reward for a vigorous workout to put my suit into the chest-high metal box, straining my biceps further to push my palm down hard on the lid of the centerfuge and squeeze water out onto the floor in a satisfying, splashy spill.  Then wonderful to walk out of the Y with everything dry and light, to get in the car and drape the nearly-dry suit over the passenger seat, my towel over the seat-back, and drive home luxuriating in the cozy, sun-heated interior.   

   Another pleasure of this new regime is getting tips from other swimmers, including blog commenters.  One of them mentioned in an e-mail that she wears a bathing cap to keep water out of her ears.  So I went shopping for a bathing cap, and Wow! have things changed in the 50 or so years since I've worn one.  Unlike the old rubber ones with a strap under your chin, the new ones are all strapless, and only one of the four kinds is waterproof.   The others have to be sprayed with waterproofing if you want to keep water out.  And the only waterproof one - the latex model - tells you on the directions that you must "wet hair before putting on."  So none of them keep your hair dry, which seemed to be the sole point of the ones I grew up with. 

  When I asked the clerks in the sports store which kind they'd recommend to best keep water out of the ears, they just shrugged.  So I picked the cheapest one, the latex at $2.99.  The others: silicone, lycra, and spandex models were all $9.99.  But when I took the el-cheapo one up to the counter, the cashier warned me about "latex allergies."  I asked if that was something I could catch myself, or does it spread through the water to other swimmers?  She said she didn't know, but that some pools ban latex caps.  

So I went and put it back and said I'd have to go to my pool to get their recommendation, that I'd had no idea that bathing caps were so complex.  It's lucky I did, because at the Y, they sold bathing caps and earplugs, and knew what they were doing.  The swimming director told me that the only way to keep water out of your ears is to put in earplugs, then wear a bathing cap to hold them in place.  So I bought a lycra cap and wax earplugs, all cheaper than at the sports store. 

    Two things have happened since I got the cap; 1. my bathing suit came out of the centrifuge with all these little white bits of lint in splotch-like shapes on the chest and back of my suit.  I thought it was from the white-painted logo on the cap, which I'd thrown into the machine with my suit.  And 2. I carry my head down in the water with my feet coming above the surface to kick, like I'm tilted toward my head as I swim.  I went and asked a life-guard about both these conditions, and she said my bathing suit elastic has rotted because the centrifuge machine is very hard on suits, that she always wraps hers in a towel and takes it home to line-dry; and that now with a cap, I'm no longer carrying my head high to keep the hair out of my face.  She'll help me with the latter, but now I guess I've got an excuse to look for new bathing suits.

Can anyone tell me how to shop for ones that have long-lived elastic?  I'll go back to wringing out my wet suit by hand (even more work for the biceps), and never use the centrifuge again, but I'd like to start out with something that will give me a couple of years of wear (given suit prices).  Is this a realistic goal?  And - is anyone still reading?

             

Swimming

My husband has arthritis in his hip, so we've had to cut way down on our early morning fast-walking, which was our primary form of aerobic exercise.  We've replaced this with swimming at the local YMCA, doing an hour's laps three days a week.  So far, probably because it's still new, it's been wonderful, filling me with a well-earned tired feeling throughout my body afterwards, as if I've given every muscle a good workout.  

At first, I had the usual self-consciousness at changing in a locker room, walking into the very public pool area under glaring lights in a bathing suit, wearing mantis-like googles, etc.  And then, as I swam, I was ashamed of how slow I was, how everyone - even the kids who were just learning to swim with kick-boards - was passing me.  But this soon gave way to the demands of the moment, as I discovered that if I didn't concentrate on what number lap I was on as I was swimming, thinking it like a mantra at every few strokes, I'd forget how many I'd done and have no measure of progress to keep me going.  Practice at anything, at least for me, is supported by a sense of progress, and I know so little about swimming, that all I had at the start was the goal of trying to extend the number of laps each time I swam.  My husband and I started at 10, and we're now up to 31.  We write them down (with pride!) on our calendar each evening.

And now I'm happy to say I'm no longer self-conscious.  There's too much else to think about, namely technique.  Not wanting to shell out money for lessons, I'm trying to pick up tips watching the fast swimmers all around me;  I know one of the obvious things they're doing to boost their speed is somersault-turns at the walls.  That's low on my list of priorities, because it'll require me to spend extra time beyond my allotted workout hour to practice flipping at the wall into a tight, quick underwater sumersault.  For now, I'm trying to pick up small techniques that I can incorporate immediately into the laps. 

One of these is to change my breathing habits from turning my head to catch a breath every time I raise my right arm to do a crawl-stroke, to not taking a breath till the third stroke.  It's gratifying to find that I'm quickly gaining lung-capacity this way.  When I started, I could only do two sets of three-stroke breaths, then I'd return to my old habit of gasping air every righthanded stroke.  But now I can go a whole lap on three-stroke breathing.  The next challenge will be to learn how to alternate sides I take breaths on.  My old habit is to turn my head only to the right to breathe.  

And I've learned to angle my hands downward as they enter the water, fingers first.  So that the entire time they're in the water, they're pushing water backwards.  Before, I was bringing my hand down flat onto the water and making wasted effort to push it down without getting any propulsion out of it.  Angling my hands has shaved 10 minutes off the time it takes me to do 31 laps.  

Once I get these new techniques cemented into habits, I'll use this extra 10 minutes to increase the number of laps I do.  But till then - and it takes slow, steady practice to break old habits - I'll take my reward in the many luxurious sensations of swimming: the silky feel of the water, the extra rythmic power when you keep your legs underwater to kick, the cozy warmth of an oversize towel after the post-swim shower, the slickness of body-lotion rubbed into tired legs and forearms, and finally, the refreshing feel of clean, dry clothes.  This workout has so much going for it, an ironic vein of gold in my husband's arthritis.