Circle Swim - Part II

When I enter the pool, I feel, sometimes, like I'm swimming against time.

There is, always, the time I have to pick up the kids.  Because of our schedule, I usually have an hour and fifteen minutes to swim and shower before I have to retrieve the kids from childcare.  That means I have to swim at a quick pace.  No time to hang out at the wall.  Just a minute to chat in the locker room.  Certainly not like high school swim practice.

There is the pace clock, clicking seconds by.  If you must know, 50 yards free on the :55 and 200 yards IM on the 4:30 (heaven help me!).

Then there is a life time.  My life seems written in my body and the story exposed when I swim.  My breaststroke kick tells of the asymmetry in my hips, seemingly born with and DQ'ed in every breaststroke race swam since the age 8.  There is the weakness in my left arm.  Will my shoulder ever recover fully from it's dislocation ten years ago?  And then the literal separation of my abdominal muscles, the result of two pregnancies.  Who thinks of their abdominal muscles, until they are gone? Or until doing flip turns.  Mine, repairable only by (elective) surgery, so says my doctor.

Time can be a mirror, reflecting who I was into my present. Perhaps there is some way swimming may erase the passage of time?  Circling myself back to the speed and strength I once had?  If I just swim fast enough.