First swim of the year

Got up early this morning - in part to get myself ready for those godawful 3AM wakeup calls that I'll be facing this weekend at Disneyworld for the 6AM race start times on Saturday and Sunday.

Over to the pool, where I started off slow. There were two people already splitting each lane, so the nice lady in the lane usually used for water aerobics invited me to swim laps in there. I warmed up for a few laps and then a half-lane opened up and I moved over.

I was having a nice swim - still getting comfortable in the water again after taking a long time off. My new mental image of balanced, effortless swimming is the water strider bug. I feel like that when I'm not fighting the water, but instead just gliding along with relatively little effort in a balanced fashion. Water strider bugs "live on the surface of quiet waters and dart about with great rapidity." Heh, water striders are predators on other insects, too. Cool. My kind of bug.

Then Eggbeater Man joined my lane. "Splitting" the lane is a huge euphemism when you're dealing with Eggbeater Man. It means I hug the lane rope and he swims wherever the heck he wants, in his splashing, thrashing, contorted style, kicking the water all the way up to the ceiling. While swimming, I could HEAR his uneven lopsided kick every time he smacked the water with his foot. He made direct contact with me somewhere between one to four times per lap. At one point I was hugging the lane divider and he STILL managed to grab the INSIDE of my ankle. It gave me the creeps, but I figured it's all good practice for those washing-machine open water swim starts.

Fortunately, though it nearly exhausted me just watching him, I was able to outlast him. He got out of the pool in just a few laps, while I continued on to finish up 1700m for a good day's workout.