i’m like a cute little fish, just with more hair
I’ve been swimming since before I could even walk. Pretty sure I went off the high diving board at the Sedalia Middle School’s indoor swimming pool (it may or may not have been involuntary depending on who tells the story) before I finished Kindergarten. When we were kids, my mom took my brother and I to the swimming pool as many days a week as she could. We swam in lakes, jumped off fishing docks, floated around in anything we possibly could. As an adult, I’ve abandoned that hobby quite a bit and the extent of my swimming has been floating around for hours in a Caribbean ocean in the middle of winter. While I’m certainly not complaining about that, that type of swimming’s main focus is making sure salt water doesn’t get in your rum-based drink, you know what I’m sayin’?
The gym I’ve belonged to for the past five months has a gym. I’ve been super hesitant to use it because, hi. Who the heck honestly likes to wear a swimsuit in public? Nobody I know.
Last summer, we were in Chicago and I was almost more excited about swimming every night than I was about our daily 7-11 Slurpee/Big Gulp stops. Then sometime this fall, we stopped somewhere in Iowa, and I woke up at 6am just to swim before we drove the rest of the way to Missouri. And then we joined a gym finally in February and I’ve been talking myself into swimming every day. It was only recently that I did and, man, am I glad I did.
I hit the treadmill, the elliptical, the stationary recumbent bike super hard every day. I’m proud of that. But I’ve realized that swimming is the way to go. It uses muscles I didn’t know I had. I breathe harder after doing some laps that I do after doing the C25K plan. I might smell like chlorine next time we hang out, but rest assured, it’s going to be worth it.
I have a cousin who swims 3000-5000 meters a day. That’s NUTS (in a good way) and is beyond even the slightest level of comprehension for me. I’m gonna be super stoked when I eventually get to 500 meters (I’m up to ~450 now!) doing all of these strokes that I’m pretty sure are made up, because that front crawl WEARS ME OUT.
Anyway. Mainly, I needed to write this post because I took the above picture. But I also wanted to write it because, hey, if you have a pool nearby you, GO SWIM. It’s super good for you and it’s a whole heck of a lot more fun than pounding your knees on the treadmill or having your butt slide around in someone else’s sweat when you ride the bike at the gym!
