4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
120 minutes
81 degrees
Another choppy night of swimming. I don’t recall seeing a corrugated surface, but I could tell the minute I started swimming that the water was going to be rough. It didn’t unsettle me; just made it harder and more draining to swim. Saw my sparkle friends and lots of bubbles. Noticed a silver flash below — a fish?! During one loop, heading back to the big beach, I noticed some birds flying over the water. Geese? Seagulls? Not sure. Also saw a few planes.
I’m not sure if there were any whitecaps but the waves were a couple feet tall and they rocked me from side to side. Swimming from buoy 2 to buoy 3, they kept wanting to drag me under. Swimming from buoy 5 to buoy 1, they were behind me and pushed me along. When I got the angle just right, I could swim fast.
10 Things
- one non-open swim club member with an orange buoy, swimming beside the white buoys
- so many sailbots, moving along the edge of the course — mostly white sails
- some menacing swan boats on the edges
- 1 or 2 canoes paddling across the course
- the milfoil is thickening again, just off the white buoy closest to the beginning of the course — as I stroked into shore, vines grabbed my wrist and my watch
- fogged-up goggles
- water color: deep green
- the first buoy was far out into the middle of the lake
- during one loop, a hissing sound beneath me, almost like air was leaking out of a tire
- a clear sky with no clouds
Swimming One Day in August
before the swim: Reviewing old entries tagged, 1 day of swimming, I found some great stuff from 2 sept 2025:
“The song I remember the most was Peter Gabriel’s “Playing for Time.”*
Oh, there’s a hill that we must climb
Climb through all the mist of time
It’s all in here what we’ve been through
Not a fan of the phrase, mist of time, but these lyrics reminded me of a few lines from Mary Oliver that I read right before heading out for my run:
Slowly
up the hill,
like a thicket of white flowers,
forever.
(The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver)
The lines just preceding these were a series of good-byes to the world: the swaying trees, the black triangles of the winter sea, oranges, the fox sparrow, blue-winged teal, lettuce, turnip, rice fields, the morning light, and the goldfinches.
Down, I’m getting it down
Sorting it out
So everything I care about
Is held in here
All of those I love, inside
Listening to these lines, I thought about Oliver’s deepening of the spirit. I thought about the interior and moving inside of yourself and of burying memories and ideas not as a way to avoid them, but to protect them. I also thought about someone growing older and having memory-loss and trying to hold onto faces and names and experiences. I weighed the possibilities and limitations of going deep inside as compared to opening up to the outside. All of these thoughts came at once — not in a linear progression — in a burst which lasted until I heard these lines less than a minute later:
There goes the sun
Back from where it came
The young move to the center
The mom and dad, the frame
I just remembered: at the start of my run, I was thinking about the difference between ordinary and extraordinary time, which was a continuation of thoughts that began earlier this morning. Habits, routines, activities/events experienced again and again — the mundane — versus the scattered, sporadic occasions that break up the routine. While meaning and memories are often found in the singular moments** I’m drawn to the rituals and repetitions and daily events as where important meaning dwells.”
*I told Scott about the song as we drove over to the lake and then we listened to it.
**are memories created from singular moments, or from the repetition of moments? conversely, do we remember something that happened only once as happening frequently, like a part of our character instead of just one instance or aberration?
during and after the swim: Mary Oliver’s one day = 24 hours / morning, afternoon, evening, night / dawn to dusk / a longing for a future time (in winter, thinking about swimming in the summer — one day I’ll swim again!) / a snapshot, one instant or instance / the start of an adventure in a fairy tale (one day the little girl wandered into the woods)