Suck It Up, Sweet Pea

For two weeks, I have been dreading the start of Master’s Swim. I signed up again because my friend Karen had that look on her face that reminded me that doing Master’s Swim felt great, in the abstract anyway.  While I was actually at Master’s Swim, it was really difficult, the longest hour I’ve spent since childbirth.  The women there were mostly training for triathlons.  That’s originally why Karen and I signed up a few years ago.  We were actually in a triathlon.

Here’s us finishing said triathlon.  We finished in a little over three hours, plenty of time for Karen to run to the bathroom 16 times and me to peddle the 1200 miles that constituted the bike portion.  I was so slow on the bike that Karen kept going ahead and circling back, telling me once, “I’ll be right back.  I have to go pass that old bitch in the sweat socks that just passed me.”

People drinking beer and sitting in old lawn chairs along the triathlon bike route cheered for me, “Go, 285!” 285 was the number the triathlon people marked on my arms and legs to identify me when I died, so I thought.  Actually it was to sell me pictures later.

It worked.  Because I bought this picture of myself getting out of the water after the 1/2 mile triathlon swim across a lake. This feat, which took me 20-some minutes, remains the proudest athletic moment of my life, rivaled only by doing a ballet leg in leotard and tights embellished with fringe on the arms and legs and wearing a faux coonskin cap in the Davy Crockett number for my high school synchronized swimming show in 1965.

So when Karen said we should go back to Master’s Swim, I said ok, but then immediately started thinking about how noxious it is to be around 30-something year old women with no body fat who do flip turns and breathe only every 12th stroke.

It’s like – What am I trying to prove?  I’ve never been an athlete.  Never.  I never ran, jogged, played tennis, or any of that shit.  I did my Esther Williams thing in high school and that was it.  I even remember helping my 10-year old daughter ‘train’ for a one-mile fun run by driving next to her in my Toyota while smoking a cigarette, although there was no open can of beer between my knees.  Seriously.  It was in Shorewood after all.

I don’t know what I’m trying to prove.  I had a therapist tell me once that “you are who you pretend to be,” but I don’t have the moves to even pretend to be an athlete although I do have to say I have a pretty perfect front crawl stroke.  Esther would be proud.

Driving back to Milwaukee from Madison I pondered this.  Why I think I need to do athletic shit that is actually kind of ridiculous in terms of outcome.  And I think it’s all about the different ideas of ourselves that we have crammed in our heads that only we know about.  Like Stevie Nicks.

Blasting in the car, Rhiannon.  I’m thinking, “People don’t know it but I’m Stevie Nicks.”  I look like this grandma but that’s not all there is.  I am Stevie Nicks and Janis Joplin and Dolly Parton, for sure.  It’s just that no one knows.

A long time ago, when I was about 20 and my grandmother was in her 80’s, I stood by her bed in the hospital, looking at her asleep.  The covers were pulled back and I could see her bare legs, thin and shapely as they must’ve always been though I couldn’t have noticed under the one inch sheath that were her support hose.  I looked at her laying there and I thought, “She was a young woman once.” She had been beautiful and carefree.  She had fallen in love and slept with a man. She had had children and she had been their mother.  And their children had children and she became a grandmother.  And that’s how I saw her.  Except that’s not all she was.  Once she was Stevie Nicks.

It’s really confusing, this aging shit.  People who are younger, you really need to double down on your smarts and your stamina, collect up all your alter egos and protect their identities.  You’re going to need them all later.