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Last Thursday was my first swimming workout. The letters, as arranged above, accurately describe the sound of me exhaling underwater as I act like I have a cinder block tied around my neck.

I alluded to all this recently, so allow me to expand and discuss and talk about myself endlessly, which is what I always knew what blogging could be about, and now I get to achieve blog nirvana. If you’d like to skip the meandering prose and pathos and cloyingly self-deprecating humor, I’ll just get to the point, and that is, I SUCK AT SWIMMING. Otherwise, read on, oh intrepid readers and fellow punishment gluttons.

So my running club has a sister Tri organization composed of several reasonably well-grounded triathletes, and every couple of weeks they have a nice swim workout or bike ride that apparently engenders camaraderie devoid of the competitive BS I hate seeing whenever you get a bunch of hyper-athletic assholes together. So a handful of decent swimmers meet at a public pool on Roosevelt Island and do drills for an hour or so, and it’s only $5. So thanks to Tim, who is the same Tim who I ran with during his first triathlon last summer, and impetuously ran the 60K with me last November, I was encouraged to come on over for much-needed training. Too intimidated to jump into the pool facility I just signed up for, I decided fast friends would give me the icebreaker I needed to move forward.

I’ve run to Roosevelt Island before, but it’s a 5-6 mile distance, and I wasn’t in the mood to find construction stopping my run, so I took the tram to the island from mid-town. After all these years, I’d never been on the tram, it’s a cable car that crosses the east river, it’s the same one you see in the climax of the first Spiderman movie. It was already nighttime, and commuters were jamming the car. The scenery and skyline was just gorgeous, and I didn’t want to get off. Sometimes you really should listen to that inner voice.

So I get to the island and the facility, which is OK, one 25-meter pool with people looking like they know what the hell they’re doing out there. Soon Tim shows up, and then the rest of the nice-looking people who will later turn away when they catch sight of my swimming form. However, for now, the two coaches are very patient and want to see me head on down the lane so as to check out where I’m at. Well, as it turns out… have you ever seen a big, black dog dive into a lake to get a stick out? And seen them coming back slowly, stick in mouth, head out of the water? Well, that’s what I WISH I looked like. I was a sight to behold… flailing, head too far up out of the water, gasping for air, cramping almost immediately. Turn away! Turn away!

So Coach Claudia calls in Coach Les who gently asks me if I don’t mind doing a few drills and laps with a board under my arm, and I’m like, no, I don’t mind because I can’t breathe out there, and breathing is quite often important, and if it’s going to take the kiddie board, bring it on. So I try that, and look like Little Ricky getting his first swimming lesson. Things improve ever so slowly, but I am not happy. And I start to clockwatch, just like in 10th grade P.E. class. A half hour later Coach Claudia tells me that last lap was SO much better, and I’m ready to have her children, which would be quite a trick for both of us, I imagine.

By the end of the session, I’m happy to say nobody was pointing and laughing or anything like they would’ve in grade school, but all those bad ‘last-one-picked-for-the-team’ memories certainly returned. Plus both my calf muscles decided to turn to granite with charley-horse pain undoubtedly due to bad kicking form. And later that night I discovered a nice cut on the bottom of my right foot that made running the next day lots more interesting.

All I can say, or ‘assess’ as one of the tri coaches I know would put it, is that I did get better over the course of the hour. But what a demoralizing night. And I’m supposed to be able to do this for an hour or more in a triathlon?

I showered, dressed, packed and made my way to the subway stop with Tim. ‘Maybe next year an Ironman?’ he asks. WHAT? EXCUSE ME? Of course, I didn’t really say that out loud, but my face said it all. I immediately longed for the good old days of crisp, white cups filled with water on tilted card tables at mile markers, and I saw myself edging over, in slow-motion, to grab a cup, down it, and continue on to some wondrous finish line realization that I’d just PR’d. But I snapped back to reality, or at least my version of it. My calves were locked, so I shuffled onto the subway car and trudged home, head hanging low.

Now, now, I know, I know, shut up, cut the whining, get on out there again, and besides, you at least got a little better, all in just an hour. I know all this. So I made the decision to seek some swimming lessons beyond just showing up for a team workout and expecting instruction fueled by pity. And to get better so as to not scare the children in the pool. That’s right. DO IT FOR THE CHILDREN! Because, as the bumper sticker says, ‘Children are our greatest natural resource’. I remembered this the next day when I put on new bike shorts that felt like a loaded diaper.

Now that I mention it, is training for a triathlon like returning to your youth? Does the swim part correspond to being in the womb? Is your birth just the ‘T1’ transition? What does that make biking and running? Do you think I have too much time on my hands to come up with this shit?

OK, OK. I need to figure out what the hell I’m doing in a pool. And I will. If I don’t, it won’t be because I didn’t try. As one coach ominously said to me last week after I asked him about training for Boston and training for a half ironman at the same time, ‘you’re not a runner anymore… you’re a triathlete.’

Well, la-di-frickin’-da.