Reading: I might have opened The Name of the Rose once.

Learning: about the DU gym's policies

Listening: The sound of my breathing from the inside. The hmmm of empty lungs. The splash of water at the side of a pool.

Moving: Swam two miles.

Viewing: "Being John Malkovich."

27 November 1999: Swim

Enough inactivity! After yet another sleep-in, we got to the DU gym around noon. We bought me a one-day pass. I'm considering joining, but right now RDC belongs as a continuous registration student for $10 a month, no peak hours. Both of us with peak hours would be $50 a month, and I'm debating just how diligently I would leave my house in the evening to make that worthwhile.

But anyway, today I swam. I was just about to get into the pool when RDC came into the natatorium to say he'd forgotten gym shorts and would have to go home. We would meet up somehow after his work-out. Then I immersed myself. Cold! Actually it was a fine temperature after I warmed up. And I'd have lots of opportunity to warm up. This pool was 50 meters long. This made for great swimming, having to flip only half as often. I have to confess I can't flip. I touch with my hand and push off with my legs, but I can't flip the way real swimmers do. And I never push myself aerobically when I'm swimming, either for lack of discipline or because I've never learned to breathe right. I think it's discipline.

So I swam. At first every length seemed eternal, but after the 20th lap, I was in the groove. I breathed after every other stroke--every other left arm stroke--and I think that speeded me up some. It's more efficient to empty the lungs fully and breathe deeper. I swam. Stopping once to readjust my goggles, I considered what looked wrong here--at the town pool, the ropes separating lanes are blue, and at UConn they're blue and white. Blue is a pool color and blue and white are UConn's colors and pool colors. The Pioneers' colors are red and yellow. Red and yellow ropes glared above blue tiling.

I shared a lane with another swimmer at first. A real swimmer, a good swimmer. We both stopped at the shallow end when I first joined him to decide to split the lane rather than go in loops, and I watched him push off and emerge several meters out. You don't like men with breasts, I reprimanded myself sternly. No, I acknowledged, but look at him swim. Both halves of me could enjoy that.

I swam. This was the first time I've swum since the town pool closed in September. (Only the emergency grouting kept the pool open that late, a whole two weeks late, to Labor Day weekend. Freakish town.) The first half-mile took forever, after which it was just me and the water.

If I were a better swimmer, I'd kick harder, breathe deeper, and comfortably do a mile in 36 minutes, not 45-50 minutes. So after lap 16, I thought hey, I can stop now. I've done a mile. But no, how long might RDC's work-out take, especially having to go home? I swam. Four laps later, I finished my second k. Four more and 1.5 miles. Another six and my deltoids ached but I had done 3k. A measly two more laps and I'd've swum two miles for the second time ever and the first time since 1990, I think, if then. Maybe my first two-mile swim ever.

I finished the second mile at the deep end (whence I'd started, obviously) and turned on my back to backstroke to the shallow end where I figured I could clamber out. I didn't want to try from seven feet in my soggy state. I'm sentimental about the backstroke because it was my first real stroke after the doggy paddle. I could do it because I could breathe when I wanted. I first crossed Uncas with a backstroke. However, I wasn't sentimental enough to go the whole 50 meters to the shallow end when I noticed a ladder in the middle. I crossed a couple of lanes and hauled myself out.

Staggering, I made it to the locker room. I peed. I soaped my body and rinsed my no-longer-tightly braided hair. I weighed myself. I folded my braid into my big clip. I dried off. I figured out how to get dressed. I even tied my sneakers, which I'd worn thinking I might do some weights. Ha. I drank deeply of my water bottle.

Coming out of the locker room, staggering toward the stairs to the main part of the gym, I turned slowly when I heard a "Hey!" It was RDC. "Did you swim all that time?"
Weak nod.
"How do you feel?"
"Wet."
I waited upstairs for him to shower. There's an abdominal thingie in the lobby--you have a foot on either side then hold yourself up on your forearms and lean against a backrest and so your legs hang, and then you haul your legs up together, supposedly until parallel with the floor. I did five sets of five, and only in the first one or two of each set did my legs reach so high. I insisted my feet clear at least a particular sight line I drew on the floor ahead of me, but neither my legs nor I enjoyed it. No belly muscle.

I glossed over the bit about my weight, d'ya notice, OMFB? I weighed myself before my swim--over 145, which is what I weighed freshling year of school, whether before or after the Pill, before or after mono, I disremember (mono happened a month after the Pill). I weighed myself after my swim, with wet hair--under 143. That's weird. I can't have sweat two-plus pounds of water.

But 145. That's what I've weighed, approximately, for quite a while. I weighed 136 when I went to Planned Parenthood for the first time, soon after I graduated from high school, and I remembered the number because I thought at the time that that was low. I've weighed in the 140s since, except for the summer of 1989 when I was mostly in the 130s. In the winter and spring of 1996, when I was very fit, I think I still weighed in the 140s with all the muscle I'd gained. 145. That's not so bad, is it? I've lost muscle and gained fat volume, I know, but am I really not as fat as I think?

CGK said Thursday that I was looking thin. She's known me for four years now but sees me rarely enough that she would notice contrast. HEBD told me two weeks ago that rumors of my obesity have been greatly exaggerated (by me, she implied)--when I told her, TJZ, and DEDBG by email about my fall, I said something about the injury giving me another excuse to be fat. HEBD's known me for almost 13 years. I just got email from TJZ today emphasizing how slender I looked on that same visit. Neither of them has maintained her college body, HEBD less so than TJZ and only in part because she's had a baby. All this weekend I've worn the Gap jeans cut for women with a figure that I bought freshling Christmas. Am I really not repulsive? I know I'm not obese, but I do have a lot of spare poundage--now that I have my great new sports bra, my ass flops more than my breasts when I do step. I hate my belly. But for three whole days now, three Thanksgiving days, I've had maybe a healthier self-image than usual. Wheeee.

In the evening, after more warmed-up leftovers, we saw "Being John Malkovich." That's a great film. The bit with Elijah and his parents was gut-wrenching, but otherwise it was great--and who says great shouldn't be gut-wrenching? HAO saw Jane Goodall at DU last year and apparently what happened to Elijah does still happen. I don't understand how humans can take any animal from its natural home. (RDC and I are both third-generation Usans, with at least two (of eight) great-grandparents apiece born elsewhere. Blake has been American for a lot more generations than either of us--but, admittedly, perhaps not for as many years.)

Maybe it's a good thing I didn't see the Komodo dragons then.

Channel-hopping after the movie, RDC and I saw a bi-plane take off from a river. "Is that my pet snake Reggie?" I asked him. It was. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" nearly from the beginning. Oh the bliss. RDC surfed from the couch and I stamped Christmas cards and gave lines like "We are...not thirsty," and "Bad dates."

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