Tag: bike

aug 1/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
77 degrees

What an evening for a bike ride! Since it had just rained, there weren’t that many people on the paths. I didn’t have to pass anyone and I didn’t experience any scary, I-can’t-see moments. The bike ride on the way back was the best — evening light, cooler air, getting closer to dusk. So much better to be on a bike, outside, than in a car. Heard the rushing creek and some kids playing in the water. Felt satisfied after 80 minutes in the water.

5 loops
lake nokomis open swim
77 degrees

The first loop was surprisingly difficult. Sometimes it felt like I was swimming through syrup — heavy, slow — and sometimes like I was against a current — never going anywhere, or being pushed off course. How strong can the current be in lake nokomis? I thought about the Seine and the Olympic triathletes and how hard it must have been to swim in that current. I’m not sure I’m tough enough for that. How will the open water swimmers do it, swimming a 10k in that current?

Gradually the loops got easier. Sighting the green buoys was almost impossible. I couldn’t really see the buoys until I was about 20 strokes from them; I relied on my knowledge of the lake and the general outline of the course to guide me and believed that I was going the right way. I think my brain was receiving some data from my eyes that I wasn’t consciously aware of — isn’t that strange? Whatever was happening, I was always swimming straight for the buoys, even when I didn’t know that I was.

The stretch from the last green buoy to the first orange one took forever. I was experiencing that Poltergeist hallway effect where the buoy was never getting closer. Since it had worked before to break than never-ending hallway spell, I decided to count my strokes, not 1 2 3 4 5 over and over, but 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 . . . 50. At first, it wasn’t working, but slowly — too slowly — the buoy got closer. With each loop this effect lessened. By the fifth loop, I was in the groove. I almost swam a 6th loop, but I thought it might be hard to bike after that and get up tomorrow morning and swim again. 5 was plenty.

I saw planes and dragonflies and sailboats. Felt a few vines. Heard some sloshing. Admired my bubbles. Experienced this weird visual effect — not an optical illusion or a hallucination, or was it?: I kept seeing the tree line, far off in the distance, as a lifeguard on a kayak. Again and again. It was irritating, because I kept adjusting my direction so I wouldn’t run into the phantom lifeguard.

Paused a few times in the middle of the lake — alone in a blue quiet.

Felt happy and strong and pleased with all the work — 10 years of showing up at this lake and gradually increasing my distance — I’ve put in to be able to swim for 120 minutes without stopping or cramping or feeling exhausted. Thanks past Saras, and good job Sara, age 50!

in the morning, while it softly rained

Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.

Interview with Paris Review / Philip Larkin

I love this about poetry.

On Ghosts V. Zombies/ Suzanne Buffam

Soul without a body or body without a soul?
Like choosing between an empty lake
And the same empty lake.

For the past few years, I’ve devoted a lot of attention to ghosts and haunts, but I’ve rarely thought about zombies. Is it partly because Scott hates zombies so much? I’m not sure why. This poem is making me want to think about them now. So many directions to go with it — the relationship between the body and the soul or the body and the spirit or the body and the mind; how, because I can’t see people’s faces or make eye contact, they look soulless to me — I’m a ghost among zombies; Alice Oswald and the Homeric mind — our thoughts traveling outside of our bodies; Emily Dickinson and the soul that wanders; the fish in us escaping (Anne Sexton) or the bees released, returned to the hive/heaven (Eliot Weinberger). Zombies can be my fall project! Maybe I can even convince Scott to give zombies a chance?! Now I’m excited for fall!

I want to wait for fall to begin studying zombies partly because fall is spooky season and partly because right now I’m still immersed in water. For August, I want to write a poem every day about water. It doesn’t have to be good, I just need to put some words on the page.

in the afternoon, after the rain, before a swim

I’m reviewing my entries from July for a monthly assignment summary. It’s giving me ideas for what to notice/think about during my swim tonight:

  1. water and light, above and below the surface; types of light; sparkles and shimmers and glimmers and glints
  2. what are lake nokomis’ rules and offerings?
  3. different perspectives of the water: from the sidewalk, above the beach; on the beach; in the shallow water; mid-lake; before/during/after a swim

I didn’t think much about the rules or the different perspectives, but I do recall noticing the light. Swimming into the light, from the little beach to the big beach, the light was too bright, blinding. Impossible to see the green buoys clearly — as green, as buoys. After a few loops, I realized that at certain angles the sun sparkled off the green buoy — just a quick flash, once. Enough to keep me believing I was swimming towards it; I was. No shafts of light underwater, but enough light to see my sparkle friends — the sediment in the water. No reflections off of the buoys, or under the water. Nothing glinting, no swimmer’s shimmering splash.

july 26/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
75 degrees

Another bike ride. Windy! The only problem I had biking over to the lake was almost running into the cement wall at the start of the double bridge. I was moving over for an approaching biker and went too far. Was it a vision error, or just a freak occurrence? Luckily, I adjusted quickly and was fine, although I played back a version of crashing into the hip-high cement in my head for a few minutes. Yikes. The rest of the bike ride was fine until I got to the bike racks and was trying to dismount. My sandal got caught in my pedal and I scraped the back of my calf with the sharp edges of the pedal as I narrowly avoided falling — that would have hurt. This one was not a vision error. Realized that I had scraped some skin off and was bleeding a little. Ugh! Waited an extra 15 minutes to go into the water to make sure it was okay and had completely stopped bleeding– it was and it had.

The bike ride back did not involve any near misses. Just gravel, sun, and 3 bike surreys nearing the locks and dam no. 1. Would they get stuck on the double bridge?

image: looking off to the left as I biked, noticing the blue river through the trees — water! Thought about all the water I encounter on this bike ride: river, falls, creek, 2 lakes.

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
73 degrees

Not too many people here for the swim. 10? 20? Rough water, rougher than last night. The swells/waves kept trying to push me to the left. I managed to stay on the course; the first green buoy struggled to do the same. It seemed to be drifting towards the second orange buoy. During the first loop, I contemplated doing only one loop. Then I decided I could do 2. By the end of 2, I decided on 3. After 3, resting in the shallow water I thought I could do a 4th. Nice work, brain and shoulders and legs!

10 Things

  1. hearing the life guard call out, attention open swimmers, the course is now open. have a great swim!
  2. seagulls circling in the sky — were they looking for fish? Did they find any?
  3. I could see my hand in front of me under the water — not clear enough to read my watch, just clear enough to see a hand
  4. the green buoy closest to the beach was also very close to the far white buoy — only a narrow space between buoys for swimming through. If it had been more crowded, that would have been a cf
  5. a few vines sliding past my arms
  6. swimming wide around another swimmer as we neared the green buoy — she stopped. As I breathed on that side I could see her face, but not that clearly. Was she scowling at me?
  7. someone — a kid? — banging a stick on a metal pole on the beach. It sounded like a flag hitting the flagpole — pretty sure there aren’t any flags near the beach
  8. Liz (she introduced herself to me) asking about open swim: excuse me, can you tell me about open swim? I’m training for an upcoming triathlon
  9. a leaking, squeaking nose plug. I wonder if the swimmer I was passing could hear it underwater?
  10. the final green buoy kept seeming farther away, like I would never reach it — like the hallway in Poltergeist that the mom is running down to the reach the room where Carol Ann is. Decided to count how many strokes it would take to get there, which broke the spell
I often think about this scene while I’m trying to reach the final green buoy.

july 22/RUNSWIMBIKE

run: 4 miles
to lake nokomis
73 degrees

Did a one-way run to the lake to meet RJP for a swim. Now that she’s 18, she’s old enough to swim across the lake, but she needs to get used to the scary, unsettling feeling of lake swimming, when you can’t see anything and scratchy vines reach up to grab your leg and there’s no bottom to touch. Her first attempt overwhelmed her — staring into a void of yellow, nothing to see in front, nothing solid to feel below. I told her about the first time I swam out to the buoys and across the lake. It was hard and I was scared. I kept thinking about Jaws. I could only swim 1 loop. It’s taken me 10 years to build up physically and mentally to swim as much as I do, I said. Later, when we were home, she said she wants to try again; she liked how it felt after she swam and maybe it wouldn’t be so scary once she got used to it. I hope it works out. I love swimming with her and feel so much joy watching her strong arms cut through the water.

One more thing about the swim: After RJP got out of the water, I swam a loop. If you ignored the algae scum, it was perfect water: still, not cold, empty. As I neared each white buoy, I displaced a seagull from their perch. Seagulls! I haven’t seen them much this summer, maybe that’s because I haven’t been swimming alone, in the morning?

Before meeting RJP, I ran. Hot! Some shade, lots of sun. I felt pretty relaxed for the first 2 miles, then I started negotiating with my legs: Can you make it to the turn-off past the mustache bridge before we walk? How about until we get over the duck bridge? Okay, we’ll take a quick walk break under the echo bridge. And we did, 2.6 miles into the run, but only for 10 or 15 seconds. When I started running again, I thought about how hard it is to notice anything when you’re distracted by the heat and the effort and your legs pestering you to walk. Can I name 10 things I noticed?

10 Things Noticed While Distracted by Heat and Fatigue

  1. park workers out near the trail, moving and weed-whacking
  2. since the last time I ran on the dirt trail between edmund and the river road someone has trimmed the tree branch that leaned over the trail — thank you, park worker!
  3. a little mud, some soft, sandy dirt, scattered tree limbs
  4. water rushing out of the sewer pipe — steady, soft
  5. someone biking on the walking path
  6. the creek was high and tumbling over rocks, impersonating a babbling brook
  7. through the trees, a kayak gliding down the creek — would they stay in until just below the mustache bridge? Does anyone turn around and paddle against the current?
  8. thwack thwack people playing on the pickleball court, hitting the balls hard
  9. a haunting call — was it a mourning dove or a kid? difficult to tell
  10. heading to the water fountain, wondering if that was where the person approaching was heading too, realizing finally that it was RJP — always unsettling when I don’t recognize the kids or Scott

Found this poem that I had archived in a document named, “Reading Links List” a few years ago: My First Black Nature Poem/ LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. So many great lines. Here’s what I wanted to remember today:

the green clearness. so mud olive I cannot see the bottom.

Mud olive — that’s the color I’ve been trying to name. That’s the mix of yellow and green with a hint of blue that I’ve been seeing as I swim across the lake!

But not this morning. This morning the lake was pale yellow; near the surface it almost looked white. Not nearly as pleasing as olive colored!

Before the run and swim, I drank coffee and looked for inspiration from the few people still on twitter. Jackpot! Found some wonderful poems from Moist (which I’ll save for another entry) and the Ten Muses of Poetry — from the writer, Andrei Codescru, in his book, The Poetry Lesson. I’ve never heard of Codescru — he’s great. I found the chapter his Ten Muses are in and read it. Funny and strange and great. I wonder, would I enjoy taking a class from him? Probably.

The Ten Muses of Poetry

  1. Mishearing
  2. Misunderstanding
  3. Mistranslating
  4. Mismanaging
  5. Mislaying
  6. Misreading
  7. Misappropriating cliches
  8. Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers
  9. Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc.
  10. Mississippi (the river)

Ending with the Mississippi? Yes!

read / heard / watched

read: Just finished reading this book excerpt on lithub: Kinds of Blue: On the Human Need to Swim. It’s an excerpt from Abundance/ Karen Lloyd. After reading the wonderful essay, I requested to book from the library!

heard: Listening to a 6 part series called Tested, written and recorded by Rose Eveleth for NPR and CBC.

Who gets to compete? Since the beginning of women’s sports, there has been a struggle over who qualifies for the women’s category. Tested follows the unfolding story of elite female runners who have been told they can no longer race as women, because of their biology. As the Olympics approach, they face hard choices: take drugs to lower their natural testosterone levels, give up their sport entirely, or fight. To understand how we got here, we trace the surprising, 100-year history of sex testing.

watched: This short video about Katie Ledecky came up on YouTube for me the other day. As a long distance swimmer, I think Katie Ledecky is amazing. I wanted to archive it for 2 reasons. First, starting at 2 minutes when she discusses how she knew that she loved swimming when she broke her arm and still wanted to get into the water. She even put a plastic bag over her arm so she could. I was thinking about this idea, but not remembering where it came from, when I was talking to RJP about trying to swim again in the lake. When you love something, you’re willing to try almost anything to keep doing it.

The second reason I wanted to archive this video was because of the story about her kid-self and how she never loses sight of the fact that swimming is something she “started just for fun, on a summer league swim team” (video start: 4:08). That idea, combined with the old footage of her as a very young kid, makes me think of Sara, age 8, and how much of what I’m trying to do now, is to reclaim her spirit and try to translate it for Sara, age 50, without losing the fun and the passion and the exuberance I had back then.

bike: 3 miles
arbeiter and moon palace books
84 degrees

I was planning to do open swim at cedar lake at 5:30, but I checked the weather and learned that an intense storm would be moving through at 6 — high winds, thunder, hail. Not good for the car, or for someone swimming in the lake. What a bummer! I had a book to pick up at the book store, Gave / Cole Swensen, so we decided to bike to Moon Palace and then wait out the storm at Arbeiter Tap Room. What a storm! Wind, rain, thunder, but no hail. We thought we were leaving after the storm, but as we unlocked our bikes, more rain.

Another year when I can see well enough to bike!

june 19/RUNBIKESWIM

run: 4 miles
64 degrees/84% humidity
minnehaha falls loop

More water. Puddles on the path. A steady summer rain falling on my head. Listened to music while running the first two miles faster. Fun! But hot–shouldn’t have worn my pink jacket. Felt free and joyful to be out in the glowing green world.

Summer Rain/John Waters

Rain-woman,
Gray-haired,
Impatient,
You didn’t stay long
With your cloud-herd
And your silver shawl.
You went towards the East,
Flashing your whip
And thundering orders.
Perhaps a thirsty corn-field
Was calling you.

bike: 5 miles
nice and slow with Ro

Rosie and I biked over to our old neighborhood so she could get her haircut. An easy ride but I’m including it here because we got outside and moved. It was supposed to be done raining, but there was a fine mist as we biked by the river.

swim: .6 miles/1200 yards/1 loop
lake nokomis

Was planning to do 3 loops tonight but when it started raining heavily after the first loop I decided to stop. It would have been fun to swim more in the water but the visibility was really bad and I didn’t want to risk getting lost out in the middle of the lake.

Here are the notes I jotted down shortly after the swim: surface, smooth. cutting through the cold water. gliding. powerful. strong. clear vision. wetsuit. rain drops entering the water, shafts of water instead of light. after I finished, standing in the water watching the drops on the surface, like little dancing beads. so cool! did I see silver streaks below me as I swam–fish? now my muscles burn warmly. cool brown water, planes above. pouring rain when I exited the water. I didn’t care.

june 5/RUNBIKESWIM

run: 4 miles, top of franklin hill turn around
bike: 8.8 miles, lake nokomis and back
swim: 1/2 mile, lake nokomis

run

65 degrees. Sunny. Only a little wind. Not too much humidity. A great morning for a run. I’m writing this several hours after the run so I don’t remember too much of it. Ran in the shade. Saw some runners and walkers, no Daily Walker or roller skiers. For some reason, I thought about house keys and where you might hide a spare one. Why (and why do I remember this detail and not much else)?

bike

I’m getting used to biking again and that feeling of not quite being able to see the path. The bike path was crowded, especially on the way back, after my swim. Passed a biker near the falls, alerting them with my usual “on your left” and they said “thank you.” I like when other bikers do that. I try to do it too. It seems rare to hear people actually alert you. Lately I’ve been working hard to not let it bother me. Noticed that sky was bright blue and cloudless. Saw lots of birds’ shadows flying overhead. Mostly small birds. Locking up my bike at the beach, I heard an older woman compliment a younger woman on “her bright yellow bike.” She had a bright yellow bike too, but it was stolen out her garage. She misses that bike.

swim

The water was clear, but not nearly as clear as it had been last week. Still, I was a bit unsettled by it, not wanting to run into any big fish or see them swimming below me. Almost ran into a small dead fish, floating a few feet in front of me. Yuck! Noticed the sloshing of the water a few times. Looked around and saw shafts of light, more like slivers of light, cutting through the brown water. Swam just outside the beach area and saw how the lake floor dropped off. Mostly avoided the plants growing up from the bottom–I think it’s the invasive Eurasian watermilfoil–but one strand? leaf? branch? tapped at my ankle and freaked me out. Didn’t think about much except for how nervous I was about what might be swimming with me. For some reason, swimmer just on the edge of the big beach is scarier to me than swimming across the lake. Strange.