Swim after rain in Seattle
It rained for a while around here this morning, not hard, and stopped at around 12:30. While I was with a fitness-training client I was thinking, I want to go swimming in the rain. Roger Deakin in Waterlog* says “Rain calms water, it freshens it, sinks all the floating pollen, dead bumblebees and other flotsam. Each raindrop exploded in a momentary, bouncing fountain that turned into a bubble and burst.” He says this on almost the first page of the book, and reading it, I envied him, and imagined maybe sometime I will experience what he experienced. (Not likely! His life of swimming was incredibly rich.)
Today, it hadn’t really rained hard enough or long enough to have that effect. We had a mild afternoon with drifting clouds and intermittent sun and blue sky. The rain was forgotten except by my garden flowers, whose foliage looked perky instead of defeated by that relentless sun we had last week.
I went to the “beach” (really a grassy park with a bit of gravel by the water) at 4:30. The lake looked dark blue and choppy. Close-up, the water was clear, and the gravel bottom looked varied and pretty as usual. Pollen and tiny bits of plant matter still floated on the surface, but I never would have noticed that had I not read Deakin’s description of rain on the surface. The coolish breeze and the partly cloudy sky, though beautiful and milder than a glaring full sun, were different weather than I’d swam in before. No matter how insignificant a difference it should have been, it felt like a less familiar environment.
I waded in, put on my goggles, submerged and floated and breaststroked like I always do, and felt right away that I was in too much of a hurry. I tried to slow down and be conscious of specific body parts to try to relax. Relax the legs — can’t do that or they sink, so I have to kick slightly. I tried to relax my “core” while exhaling under water, like I’d been able to do the other day, but could not seem to do that today. I tried to swim a crawl stroke and again felt I was rushing every piece of it. Instead of doing a languid roll to breathe, initiating from the hip, I seemed to be yanking my head from side to side with my neck.
I kept finding myself out of breath and putting my feet on the ground. I didn’t want to relax and recover by back-floating because I thought the choppy surface might send water right into my sinuses as it has before. Instead I bobbed up and down for a while, breaststroked for a few more minutes, and got out of the water after only 15 minutes total. I wasn’t super comfortable, and I feel I’m not improving my skills by practicing. I will sign up for a few more lessons sometime in the next two months.
In the meantime I’m going to read or watch technique material by swimming teacher Terry Laughlin. I want to swim a nice relaxed crawl and I want to start to feel the sense of gliding. When I breaststroke, I want to do more forward movement and less vertical sinking and rising. I want to feel I can swim as long as I want to, just the way I feel I can walk as long as I want to.
Dripping, I moved onto the grass and sat in the sun in my running shorts and lightweight wool T-shirt, wrote in my journal, and then drove to the store. I like that outfit for swimming more than a one-piece bathing suit at this point because of body coverage, ease of going to the bathroom, and being able to run an errand without changing clothes. They dry out quickly until they’re just barely damp.
*Deakin, Roger. Waterlog: A Swimmers Journey Through Britain (p. 3). Tin House Books. Kindle Edition.
