Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Swim Club

I've noticed that as I get older (now a decrepit forty-three), I get injured more and more often in my workouts.

The frequency appears to be heading toward the physical fitness equivalent of the Golden Ratio, or 1.618 injuries per workout. I can only hope that this happened to Fibonacci as well, so that after he turned forty he pulled a hamstring every time he played bocci.

This has led me to conclude that I am cleverly made out of balsa wood. It appears that the only safe place for me to exercise is suspended in mid-air, pinwheeling my legs at high speed in a contraption made by the ACME Company. I'm one step away from trying that.

That one step, for now, is swimming. My primary asset as a swimmer is that I don't sink. I swim at a ponderous pace that evokes the operation of locks in the Panama Canal. I can swim for a long time, though, and I'm just trying to get fit again, so it's a decent match. We have a pool about a quarter-mile from our house, so I walk down there, thrash around like a manic seal, and walk home.

Swimming has kind of a seductive quality to it, and by 'seductive' I mean 'I can't raise my damn arms.' I am so sore that I feel like a walrus on land, barely able to even move. The only place I'm not sore is in the water, a rich and evil irony. No matter how sore I am, in the water I feel deceptively good, more than good enough to work out, and it's only when I step out of the pool that I feel my body merge with a fifty-ton anvil.

Wicked, wicked water.

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