Tag: swimming

Sensory

January 9th, 2026

One of my favorite things about winter, besides fires in the fireplace, is going into the sauna to dry off after my morning swim. Sometimes, that’s the reward that gets me out of bed at 5am, when it’s frigid out, to put on a swimsuit and go jump in a cold pool.

This morning, after my swim, I pulled the smooth wooden handle of the sauna door and, as it always does, warm air billowed out as I stepped in. The scent of the wood gets me every time. Every time. It’s warm and spicy as if it’s been baking in the sun. When I step in, everything falls away, and I just stand there and inhale, deeply, smelling the wood that grew in the earth and sun and rain, that scrubbed the air, that made its own food, that stood tall and reached for the sky while making shade and shelter for forest creatures, before I start moving again to towel off. The sauna is cozy, planked entirely with cedar boards — under my feet, above my head, walls, benches — like I’m in a toasty cabin while winter rages outside.

As I breathed the spiced air, as I felt the warmth seep into my skin, as I steeped in the visual pleasure of the wood boards and the cozy warm light, I remembered that wanted to set an intention this year to pay attention to my senses. I want to deepen my experience of being alive.
The sweet taste of finishing

June 14th, 2024

Sometimes, I don’t want to get up at 4:45 in the morning to go to the pool and swim. Sometimes, the night before, I’ll weigh whether I really need to go, maybe I could just walk for exercise later in the day instead. Sometimes, when my alarm goes off, I lay in bed and debate whether to go.

At that point, the cats are walking on me, so I have to get up to feed them anyway. But sometimes I consider, should I just put my robe on and get back in bed after I feed them? Or should I suit up?

When I get to the pool, sometimes I think, well, I can always stop early if I don’t feel like doing the full workout. Fifteen laps isn’t 25, but it’s better than zero. And then I start swimming, and I think, I can stop after this set if I want to.

Sometimes, I go through all of those debates with myself. I debate because it’s hard, because I don’t want to, because I want to skip ahead to the breakfast part of my day.

But one of my favorite moments in life, and it happens almost every time I go through all of this mental nonsense about “do I swim? do I not swim?”, one of my favorite moments that I savor every time it happens, is when I touch the wall after my 25th lap and know that despite it all, I swam. I did something good for myself, I didn’t give in, I didn’t give up, and now I’m done, I got it over with, I don’t have to exercise any more that day, it wasn’t really that bad, after all, and I feel kinda good, and now I get to get out and get dressed and go home to drink coffee and eat my oatmeal with berries and nuts and nutella.

Daily writing prompt
Describe one of your favorite moments.
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Sauna

December 20th, 2023

Mornings have been icy cold the past two days. Yesterday, I sat at our kitchen table with my notebook at 5am before my swim, and my phone rang: schools would be closed due to dangerous driving conditions. I didn’t know whether that meant the aquatic center would also be closed. I debated for ten minutes on whether to make the attempt — to go out in the cold to warm up the car and scrape the windshield in a wind that felt like ice shards — knowing the pool might be closed when I arrived.

I decided to risk it. The roads weren’t that dangerous, not in a Suburu; there was no weather happening except wind, there were just some icy patches. Nobody is on the road around here at 5:15am, and the entire 7 minute drive has a speed limit of 25mph, so I was safe.

When I arrived at the aquatic center, the lights were on inside, I saw lifeguards and our trusty early morning attendant getting the sign-in sheet ready inside, and other swimmers sat in their warm cars waiting for the doors to be unlocked.

On the pool deck, everyone chattered about going through the same wondering thought process I did — will it be open if schools are closed? — and then we all got in and swam our laps. The pool I go to is warm, thankfully, and steam rose from the lap lanes.

The locker rooms, however, are not warm. After my swim, I opened the door to the changing room, and the cold air on wet skin was a bit of a shock. The splashing of swimmers echoed on the tile floors and walls, and I stood dripping in a puddle on the cold floor. I grabbed my towel, which I’d hung next to the sauna. I eyed the sauna door and thought, hmm, it’ll be warm in there. So I stepped into the wood-planked room. The wooden floor was warm on the soles of my feet. The planks were absorbent and welcoming. No standing in puddles. I was enveloped in heat, a muted quiet, and the scent of warm cedar.

I toweled off in the sauna, and it was such a delightful experience, such an easy little treat to myself, that I will make it part of my winter swimming ritual. I’ll brave the cold mornings to drive to the pool and swim, and my reward at the end will be to dry off in the sauna, where the heat warms me to my bones.

Daily writing prompt
What was the last thing you did for play or fun?
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Follow through

June 13th, 2023

I started swimming laps again in April. When I slipped under and pushed off the wall, I remembered how much I love being in water. My habitual practice set came back to me immediately, despite it being over a year since I last swam.

I signed up for an annual pass, and swimming is now part of my daily routine.

After two months of swimming four days a week, though, I saw no improvement in my stroke or my lap times, which seems like it shouldn’t even be possible. After two months, I should see at least a little improvement, right?

Perhaps this is obvious, but it became clear at some point that things wouldn’t change without me changing something. I watched some technique videos and started incorporating new drills into my practice.

Over the past week, I made one small change that cut 2 seconds off of my lap time: I paid attention to finishing the stroke. One thing I like about swimming is that it’s very technique-driven. This anchors me to the present moment. I’m paying attention to almost every body part as I move through the stroke: what is my leading hand doing, where are my hips for the kick, are my feet just flopping around, is my recovering arm relaxed and actually recovering?

Before I watched the technique videos, when I swam, I primarily paid attention to my pulling hand as it entered the water, then my elbow to make sure it was at the best angle to get a good strong pull; as soon as that hand was under my body, my attention would shift to my kick or my recovering arm that was out of the water. What I neglected was the follow-through of my pulling hand, which needed to complete its cycle. That hand still had a lot of water it could push against to propel me forward.

As soon as I paid attention to the follow-through, my performance immediately improved.
Switching things up

April 18th, 2023

For two days in a row, I’ve gotten up at 4:45am to write three pages before heading over to the pool for my 5:30am lane assignment. When my alarm went off this morning, I was not happy about it. I regretted my life choices. I regretted committing to going through The Artist’s Way with friends, I regretted running on an injured foot to the point that now I can’t run at all, I regretted signing up for a 5:30am swim lane.

Once I was out of bed, and my teeth were brushed, and the cats were fed, I sat with my notebook and pen at the kitchen table. The fixture above the table cast a small field of warm light; otherwise I was surrounded by darkness. My pen moved across the page, probably saying something like, “I can’t believe I’m doing this, what was I thinking.” I don’t remember what I wrote. The point of the three Artist’s Way morning pages is to let stuff flow out of my brain and onto the page to clear things out. Maybe something fresh will enter into the space. Maybe not.

I felt better after writing. I didn’t regret things quite so much. Once I was in the pool, I loved my life choices. I’ve started going to the aquatic center closer to our house, the less fancy one than where our daughter swims, and I love everything about our little community pool. The floors in the locker room feel like they’re heated, though I can’t imagine they are; I think there’s just a radiator cleverly placed in the narrow area where we change so that the heat from it makes the floor warm. The pool itself isn’t a cold shock to jump into because it’s more of a recreation pool for community laps and swim lessons rather than a competition pool. And probably my favorite of all, lane signups are on a large pad of paper, actual paper, with someone behind the desk assigning lanes. They even use white-out when someone cancels. I didn’t know white-out even existed anymore. The whole process is very human compared to picking slots online, which is convenient and wonderful, don’t get me wrong. But I like saying hi in the morning, and the woman behind the desk saying hi to me, telling me which lane I’m in and who I’m sharing with, and asking me if I want to go ahead and sign up for next week, the new schedule just came out and it’s an empty slate.

The 5:30 swim lane appointment makes me do my two highest priority things before I do anything else. Yesterday was my first day doing it, and the whole rest of my day, I felt accomplished. Anything else I did on top of my 30 minutes of writing and my swim were bonus. The change in routine mixes up my whole morning, which opens me to mixing up my whole day. I’m even considering leaving the house today to work. This is not something I usually do! I also haven’t done it yet, so we’ll see if it actually happens.

That being said, the 5:30 lane appointments also prohibit me from doing other things before work that I like to do. They don’t really allow for a leisurely morning. For my other two slots this week, I’ll go at 11:30 am. I’m eager to see how busy the pool is at that time, and how it affects my work to take a break midday. It always seems to be beneficial when I take a break to run midday. My mind gets a refresh, and I often work things out when I give my body a jostle during the day. Maybe the same thing will happen with swimming.
Pool fancies

October 17th, 2021

Swimming laps for exercise is high maintenance. It used to be that I could swim laps before work, at 5:30am, while our daughter was at practice. Since the college swim team appropriated that early morning time slot, our daughter’s practice has moved to later in the day, and the pool is no longer open for lap swimming while either swim team practices.

This means that my personal swimming now takes effort. It takes effort not just to actually swim laps, but to plan to swim laps: to find a time in the day to get over to the pool while it’s open, to arrange my workday around the time that I can reserve a lane, and to drive the 15 minutes each way for myself separate from the times we already go to the pool to drive our daughter.

Swimming laps for exercise wasn’t special in the before times. It used to be that my post-swim shower kit was filled with sloppy seconds of shampoos, conditioners, moisturizers, and body lotions. I’d swim, then shower in the locker room with whatever bottom-of-the-bottle stuff I had left over from home.

These days, I go out of my way to swim laps in a way I never had to before. It’s kind of a pain in the ass. It disrupts my day, it uses extra gas, it takes time out of my morning writing because I work for an hour before going to the pool, come back to work an hour and a half later than my normal start time, and extend my work day by a half hour.

Swimming really has a lot going against it.

But I love it. I love swimming laps. I love the actual swimming of the laps. It’s all the annoyances that go into swimming laps that make it high maintenance.

It recently occurred to me that to balance out some of the negatives of my new swimming normal, I can make my lap swims feel special instead of feeling guilty about their disruptiveness. I threw out all the old bottom-of-the-bottle toiletries. I treated myself to high end shampoo for my swim kit, fancy facial cleanser, and luxury moisturizer and body lotion that I only use after I swim.

These are very simple things. Very basic. And yet, they are enough to get me excited about going to the pool beyond the laps I’ll get to swim. They tip the scale from annoying disruption to special occasion.