Summer Time!
Summer is here for sure. I’m back to swimming again, quite joyously — although a bit late. Our community pool opened in late May, but I was traveling, then got sick as soon as I returned. Still, I love swimming there, under the blue sky, surrounded by forest. Morning lap hours run from 8 to 10am, right up until the aquarobics class begins. There’s a regular crew of lap swimmers, and over the last few summers we got to know each other.
You may remember me boasting that I swam 100 laps in our 25-yard pool last summer. Even I was surprised I could swim that much. Unlike most of the lap swimmers I share the pool with, I wasn’t a swimmer growing up. I took lessons at community college and learned breaststroke. Then in my 30s, my friend Lezlie — a competitive swimmer — taught me freestyle. I’m grateful for her as much as for the ability to swim itself.
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So once I’d recovered from whatever it was that had me coughing for days, I got to the pool as gleefully as I could manage. I knew I should start slow, and I did — 30 laps, then 40, then 50. But work got busy, and I found myself driving back and forth to L.A. several times. Too much, too fast, apparently — because two weeks later, I crashed again. Exhausted. Achy. Done.
I surrendered and went to see an acupuncturist. She told me my body was stressed. 😳 Duh. The next day, a video visit with my doctor. “You’re simply over-exerting,” he said. 🥹 Ugh.
How is it so hard for me to take it easy?
Maybe that’s the real practice this summer — not the laps, but the noticing. My body has been telling me the same thing in two different offices, in two different vocabularies, and I still had to hear it from the outside before I could believe it. There’s something very human about needing permission to rest, even when every signal is already coming from within. So today, I swam 40 laps — a little slower, a little more mindfully — and let myself float for the last few minutes instead of pushing for one more. Maybe that’s enough.
