WHEEZE
Today I rode my bike to the new swimming pool in Riley Park. It’s a nice pool! I did some laps but not too many (easing into it, y’see) and then came home again, wondering how I’d gotten SO GOOD at lengths since the summer that it was hardly any work at all getting across the pool. Clue: I was doing 25 m lengths. Kits pool? 137m.
Oh, yeah. That.Â
I essentially did laps sufficient to have taken me once across Kits pool and back. Not quite burning up the waterway, there.
I’m going to try to make this some sort of regular practice, only I’ll have to be brave when the rains come. It seemed an expensive practice for just 15 minutes or a half hour worth of swimming, but they’ve got a toonie swim in the afternoons sometimes – so I think I’ll do it just before picking the kids up, rather than first thing in the morning. And as I get faster sur ma bicyclette, I’ll have more time in the pool.
The only problem I’m having is my old exercise asthma. Always have had it, but mild enough that I don’t take medication – as I get warmed up, it usually fades. It just means I really wheeze and huff when I get started.
Which makes for feeling pretty dorky in grade school. Also plus, my skin is so thin that I wonder why I bother pretending to have some: when I am working, I turn BRIGHT RED, but if I’m wheezing, it’s more of a deep burgandy. Oh, such the dork!
However, this return to higher output exercise seems to mean the magical fading asthma isn’t quite as fade-y as when I’m more accustomed. So while I’m sitting and working on my Fortuitious Contract, I’m whistling at myself.
Yay for swimming, and yay for persistence!
I have had a hard time getting to the pool oh, this last year and a half or so. But! I finally decided to reframe the whole pool thing into “doing something active that makes me feel better” and I think it’s helping. I’ve been talking little walks or lifting weights and I started going to a yoga class and it’s helping. Moving, moving, moving: these bodies want to be moved, and it’s so easy not to do it.
I am one of those lucky ones who doesn’t have resistance to exercise as long as it’s not right at the end of the day. My real exercise demon is being too-bombastic and therefore prone to injury, which ends up benching me for longer than I like.
This summer was when I was able to get back to real cardio-involved exercise, and while dancing I realized the attraction.
It feels always like I’m dissolving into the movement, the me of me breaking up and floating away, a disembodied but sensual experience. Like I disappear, and there’s just music, or water, or the wind and sun or rain on my bike.
The problem being that pain stops being a clean signal that I’ve Gone Too Far.