It usually happens after the tenth lap. The weight of my body is released. Where it goes, I’m not sure—dispersed through that particular light blue-green of chlorinated pool seen through goggles, dissipated by the steady back-forth, back-forth of body through water. The first few laps are often dutiful, even agonizing. But when that lifting occurs, it’s all suddenly different: I’m alone in my aquatic capsule, my carapace of skin. If all goes well—no one else too close ahead or on my heels behind—I become enmeshed in the water, no care, no worry. Body and mind, so often split, two alien entities, are, for at least this brief time, one.
For me, the world is too present in an aerobics class—the sight of the other people, the thump of the music. And I never much wanted to compete, to chase a ball or be on a team. It’s not that I’m a solitary person. On the contrary, I love people. Which is all the more reason to regularly disengage, to disappear from the hurly-burly of the world for a while.
Growing up, I enjoyed jumping waves in the ocean and an occasional swim in a bay, but nothing more. Then, in my late twenties, I became friends with a woman I later called Coach. She swam obsessively—a mile every night after work and on the weekends, too. She never made dinner plans for earlier than eight thirty because that’s when she was finished at the pool. She probably got her lean, wiry body from her genetic code, but her toned shoulders and well-muscled arms could have come only from those endless chlorinated miles. I didn’t understand her devotion until I accompanied her to the pool as a guest one day.
I was smitten. I loved the feeling of my arms pulling me along, the texture of the liquid all around me. I slowly acclimated to swimming culture—learning the lingo of length and lap, how many to a mile, how to use a kickboard, the way a flip turn improves your time. I never got terribly speedy or even approached Coach’s diligence, but I did swim. I joined her pool, assembled my swim gear, bought a good pair of goggles. And when I did my first mile (thirty-six laps in most pools), I was inordinately proud. It sounded so grand: an entire mile. There was a ring of completeness to it, an aura of virtue.
Slowly, my arms developed a hint of muscle. I got my mile down to fifty minutes—a good time for a slowpoke like me. I settled into a schedule, sometimes doing just three-quarters of a mile, with half a mile as my bare minimum.
As I stroke up the lane, I count: one. On the way back I repeat: one. And I proceed from there: two-two. Three-three. Thoughts and ideas may crowd into my head, but they are all eventually banished by the slow, steady, rhythmic need to keep count. Four-four. Five-five. And soon, that amazing lifting sensation comes: the reward, when I take off and begin to flow.