Swim (me) part deux

Last summer, I posted Swimmies, about my kids’ swimming despite the fact that I hate doing it myself.  Nothing earth-shattering has changed between then and now.  But on a recent trip with my family, I was trying to keep up the exercise routine (Run. Get sore/injured. Repeat.) when I discovered that I hate swimming slightly less than I used to.  It all started with my husband taking our two children down to the pool before lunch.  He’s known as “the fun one” in our family.  Most of our family vacations will find him enduring hours of Marco Polo in the hotel pool while I remain at the side of the pool, in a swim suit but dry, fussing over towels and sandwiches.

Here at home, one of the features I like about the gym I go to is that it has a pool.  But I wouldn’t dream of swimming in it.  Chlorine turns my hair brittle and Raggedy-Ann-awful, takes forever, and then there are those awful associations of my father standing over me, shouting to go faster. Still, it’s nice to know I could cross-train and save my creaky, rickety ankles and knees a few years longer.

I’ll cut to the chase and just say that I did end up swimming.  On two days of our trip I swam for about an hour.  It wasn’t the hurts-so-good punishment of running, so I assumed that I hadn’t “really” worked out, especially since I was swimming a leisurely breaststroke.  (My freestyle, the stroke formerly known as the crawl, has always kind of sucked.  I just can’t get serious about lifting the non-breathing-side elbow out of the water.)  But I suspected that I was getting a decent amount of exercise, since I was ravenously hungry both of my swim days.  When I returned home I looked up the estimates for calories burned for running vs. swimming.  I expected that my leaden-treaded 10-minute mile would cream swimming — but it didn’t.  It was exactly the same.

My kids were thrilled that I was swimming, even if I still wasn’t as fun as my husband.  The fact that I was in the water somehow counted as “play.”  They are both water safe, which freed me up to praise their pencil dives and cannon balls between laps.  Swimming laps was surprisingly “mental.”  While running the same track or treadmill over and over again can feel like a hamster wheel, swimming back and forth was closer to meditative.  Maybe it was due to novelty, but my mind traveled in a way that felt less like disco-driven punishment (my running mixes feature mostly songs at least 100 to 150 beats per minute) than like aerobic tai-chi.  And there was something about being immersed that was calming, even as I felt myself flush with exertion at every break.

I’m home now and wondering if checking out the pool at the gym, maybe once a week, would help me with that meditation habit I’m trying to develop.