It was raining this morning; not steadily and not too hard–just on and off drizzle. And it was cool; not cold, but pearly gray and cool, nice for April but cold for June. But it’s June and Saturday morning in June is swim meet time.
I checked my phone–a couple of emails from a coach, and an email from a new parent wondering why she hadn’t received any notification that the meet was canceled. Lol. I broke the news that swim meets proceed rain or shine unless it thunders and there was no thunder.
This morning was time trials and we didn’t have enough officials, so I had to do three jobs: referee, starter, and stroke/turn judge. It was hectic, I tell you. Hectic. The light rain continued, stopping for a few minutes here or there. I was under an umbrella for the starts but I had to run back and forth to confer with stroke and turn judges and adjudicate disqualifications. That’s what officials do, see. Armed with a whistle and a clipboard, we confer and we adjudicate.
Later, a friend and I went for sushi. We’ve been trying to coordinate this lunch date for literally months. Her sons are my younger son’s oldest friends. The boys were in preschool together and don’t remember a time when they didn’t know each other. We talked about our jobs (hers is much crazier than mine because she works for Congress), our household routines, our reading habits, and our vacation plans for this summer. We talked about trying to stop being mindlessly busy for five minutes. We talked about “just being human,” as my friend put it. It was lovely to sit with a friend, just being human together.
After lunch, we picked up groceries at the nearby Safeway because let’s not get carried away with the just being human thing. We have shit to do. We finished our shopping and parted ways, she to return home to work for a bit and me to return home to write the weekly swim team email, and change the beds and just generally clean up and organize and ready myself for the coming week. At 7:30, I thought about swimming, despite the unseasonably cool temperature, overcast sky, and freezing cold water. I couldn’t stop thinking about swimming so I put on my suit, grabbed a towel, and drove to the pool, where the young lifeguard at the front desk, another friend of my child and child of another friend, advised me to avoid the water. “Not a good idea, Mrs. P,” he said, shaking his head. I laughed.
“Almost everything I do starts out as a bad idea,” I said. “But you might be right. I’ll see.”
The water was almost, but not quite, as cold as I imagined. Gray skies with no sunshine leaves the pool water looking rather dank. I find that I like it that way. Not nearly as much as I like it when the water is warm and blue and sparkling in the sun, but swimming is swimming and I’ll take it in almost any conditions. Still, I found that I could only tolerate about 500 meters, and I practically ran to the shower, where I stood under the hot water and felt the chill leave my body.
It was awesome.
Yesterday (Sunday) was bright and sunny and as is often the case, the water felt colder on the warm sunny afternoon than it did on the cool dank evening. I pushed myself to 600 meters, and was still cold, so I finally got out, blue and shivering.
Still awesome.
Now it’s Monday evening, not quite 6. It’s always hard to transition from the weekend routine to the much more rigid and hectic weekday routine but once Monday is over, the rest of the week is pretty easy. It helps when you like your job as much as I like my job. I love my job.
But I don’t love my job as much as I love that lap lane on a hot day and it’s hot today, legitimately summer humid almost-blazing hot. I’m going to finish some housework, post this bilge, which is about nothing except how much I love summer, and then I’m going to swim. The temperature reached the low 90s today, so the water has to be a tiny bit warmer. I’m trying for 700 meters.
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