4 loops (8 cedar loops)
100 minutes
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees
A great swim. I think I’ve only ever swum at cedar lake in the morning one other time, in august of 2019 when lake nokomis was closed for the rest of the season because a few kids pooped near the big beach and the e-coli was crazy high. I liked it, although it took some adjusting. In the late afternoon, the sun is always in my eyes on the back half of the loop. This time, in the morning, it was in my eyes during the front half. The first loop felt great, the second a little harder as I worked on my stroke and breathing properly, but by the third loop I had locked into a steady rhythm. I wasn’t paying attention to my stroke or breath, I was just moving through the water.
10 Things
- an orange glow on the water just below the orange buoy
- orange at the edge of my vision as I swam
- something big and white through the trees and on the shore. When I was swimming, it just looked white, but when I stopped to study it, I realized it was a house
- a vine landed on my shoulder and I was able to whip it off with my hand mid-stroke
- a small bird flying fast above me
- someone with a bright pink safety buoy, swimming wide around the course
- the surface of the water: blue with soft ripples
- only a few clouds
- lifeguard as landmark: on the edge of the course
- lifeguard as obstacle: too close to the orange buoy
In the later loops, I started reciting the Alice Oswald lines I’d memorized last month. Struggled a little, but managed to remember most of them. Even as I struggled with the lines, the act of reciting them distracted me — or, did it focus me? — and I entered the flow –everything water and motion. In my head, as I stroked 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left 1 2 3 a slight head lift to sight 4 5 breathe right, I linked this flow state with some sentences from Anne Carson’s “1=1”:
And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it. Not at all like meditation—an analogy often thoughtlessly adduced—but, rather, almost forensic, as an application of attention, while at the same time, to some degree, autonomic.
Oh yes, for much of that 100 minute swim, I was in it, in the water, in my life, in motion, where motion = the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action.
Speaking of motion, I found this from Susan Tichy this afternoon:
All I wanted for the poem was openness, a merging of muscle-memory with the skittering of words down the page, to know as a process of motion.
Susan Tichy
Does muscle-memory = those ten thousand adjustments? In the early loops, my adjustments — of my head for better breathing, elbows for better power, hips for more buoyancy — were conscious and took me out of myself, but in the later loops, I didn’t think about how I was stroking or breathing and sighting, I just did it.
In her mention of skittering of words down the page, Tichy is talking about her efforts to write about mountains. How to describe it in terms of today’s lake water? Bobbing on the page? Gliding across the page, directed by currents, re-routed by waves or lifeguards or other swimmers?