J'ai de l'eau dans mes oreilles.

[mrissa]

But it was good; I'm definitely doing this again tomorrow morning, and possibly ever other morning I'm here.

The odd thing about swimming while dealing with vertigo is that the force of waves produced by two smallish women swimming in a long, narrow pool is enough to knock me for a loop if I try to stand up in it afterwards. (So I did try. Repeatedly. What's the worst that happens if you get knocked off your feet in five feet of water, and you're five-foot-six and already have been swimming? You float an inch or so off where you were standing and get your feet back down and try again. Therefore it's pretty safe, and probably good for me to do.)

It took me a few lengths to get my scissor kick back. It wasn't that I didn't have the strength, it was that I never swam sidestroke enough for it to be natural. Backstroke I had right away, the specific arc of the arms and like that. Breaststroke the same. But the scissor kick on my sidestroke took a bit of feeling out. Amazing how much easier that sort of thing is once your legs are pulling their weight, so to speak. I hadn't been swimming in way too long. Now I'm wondering if we can figure something out. Hmm.

More later.

Comments

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

Depending on Marc's insurance policy, many insurers cover at least part of a gym membership. Lifetime Fitness and the Y at least have pools. Not sure of the others.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thank you for trying to be helpful. I don't know what Mark's new insurance will be like, but we're not in a position where a gym membership would be a major hardship even if we had to pay out of pocket. The thing is -- the constant refrain of this entire year for me is -- I am not independently mobile. I can't drive myself to a pool. I can't walk to a pool (either from home or from a bus stop) without assistance. I would need someone else to help me get there; depending on the setup, I might need someone to help me get into the pool from the locker room. This does not make it impossible, but it's a higher barrier to overcome than just getting exercise at home on the bike, with weights, and with yoga and Pilates routines.

In this particular hotel, the layout is easy enough for me to get around from my room to the pool and back again. This is not going to be the case when I get home.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Would a cab to the pool (if you could find a place where you were okay indoors) be at all workable? Your town is certainly more spread out than mine, so maybe it doesn't make sense, but I figured I'd toss it out there.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I have a hard time swimming in lanes due to poor eyesight and not having contacts to wear under goggles, but I do so enjoy swimming at a hotel pool when I get the chance.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for trying to help. Indeed a cab might work if the indoor portion of the pool worked, but if the indoor portion of the pool worked, it would probably be just as workable to get markgritter or timprov to drive me, or my mom: possible, but as I said to cadithial, higher activation energy than just doing the stuff I can do at home.

(We have at least two pools within a $5 cab ride of us. I would tip, obviously, but still: if it was decent out and I was feeling steady, I could walk it.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This one is very narrow, probably three lanes wide if they marked lanes. Which they don't. But despite poor eyesight (and gas permeable contacts: not wearable under goggles unless you really trust your goggles, and I don't have goggles because I don't trust them that much), I managed to stay pretty well on my own side of the pool and did not have noticeable problems sharing it. So that was good.

This particular hotel pool is off in such a corner of the hotel that timprov was here for several days last year and didn't know there was a pool at all. Which seclusion helps, because if I'm going to go swimming in the early morning, I do not want a social experience: not with random passersby, but especially not with friends I would otherwise like to talk to. But people really can't stumble upon this pool, or wander by and see that I'm in it and come in to see how it's going. It's just the quiet of one other woman in the locker room, and I like coexisting in pleasant, friendly silence with small numbers of other women in locker rooms. So that's very fine.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Oh, swimming. It has been too long. You're one of several people I know who has been talking about swimming recently (which means, I realize now, 'in the past year') and every time I resolve to find a way to make it work. My obstacles boil down to vanity and an unwillingness to wash my hair twice a day. I could probably make it work if I had a swimming buddy to hold me accountable and/or drive on very cold nights.
It sounds like a relaxing time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The nice thing about swimming in the morning in the hotel is that I rinsed off before getting in the pool, but I had my day's shower after swimming, so I only washed my hair once.

Very cold nights are a problem. I had a water aerobics class in college (which I thought would be aerobic swimming, sigh; but at least I came out of it really pretty good at treading water), and I had it fall semester, which meant that it started out all right and really quite refreshing and got rather awful rather quickly, having to walk around campus with hair that would not dry before I had to be at my next class. My advisor wasn't my advisor yet then, but he was really if you know what I mean, and he was very worried and wanted to make sure this state of affairs did not occur again. (It didn't.)

The thing I forgot to put in this post is that if you're treading water properly, and you go off the vertical, the water will push you back to vertical. I can't help but think this is probably a good thing.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

Yay for happy swimming! I'll hope that you can find a way to make it a regular thing. I'm assuming you and your PT have discussed pool therapy? I'd happily join a "take Mris to pool" rotation schedule.

I'm not much of a swimmer, generally just splash around. I have this thing about getting my face wet. I can't stand water on my face, and so I can't do anything but a backstroke and doggy-paddle. But I still enjoy being in a hotel pool when we have time (rare during the busy cons, but I try).

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Suggestion: wash your hair only after swimming. For years I kept reading articles saying it's better for your hair *not* to wash it daily, but I couldn't reconcile that with five sweaty workouts a week. Tehn I came across a helpfu one (in a women's sports magazine) pointing out that sweat is water-soluble and rinsing will make it go away. So now I wash it only every other day and rinse on days between. I know that won't work with swimming since chlorine does *not* come out well with only rinsing, but it seems to me you could wash it after the swims and just rinse the rest of the time.

My hair has been very short for the last month, but I've been doing this for years, for much of which it was down to midback. I never blowdry though, even when that's entailed going out in winter with it wet (in college it used to freeze) so YMMV.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for offering, dear, but you'd mostly be free in evenings, yes? I need to get serious exercise done by 3:30 p.m. if I can manage it; weird bodily morning person quirk.

Backstroke can be great exercise if you do enough of it. Most of what I'm allowed to do right now isn't long on getting my face wet anyway: no front crawl (freestyle), no underwater swimming, no diving. I was never any good at diving anyway. And probably no butterfly, but I never learned to do that one properly, either. So breaststroke, sidestroke, backstroke, treading water. All of which can be done dry-faced. Yay!

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I think that if I decide to swim at all, it'll have to be at night-- I'm a night shower person, so I could lump de-swimming and getting-clean into one.

In middle school, my class had gym right before lunch. This was good most of the time, but there was recess in there too. During the few weeks of the year that we swam-- conveniently placed in December-- most of us huddled by the door, glaring at the supervisors who wouldn't let us in. There was a year in junior high where I had second-period gym, and during swimming, I just left my hair braided and floofing out because it was too much trouble to do anything else to... and I drip, drip, dripped my way through the rest of the way.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I am related to people for whom that advice would work, but I am sadly not one of them. Second-day hair is different from fresh hair, though perhaps only to me; third-day hair is apparent to everyone. I went a week once, and while it was nice to be able to put my hair up with no effort whatsoever, I had a good ten inches of oil slick.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I also like your adviser-who-was-not-then-advising-in-an-official-capacity quite a bit. I got very protective of my Gen Bio students when I TAed that class-- surprisingly so. It was handed down from my professors to me to them, I guess: we will circle around you, you will circle around them, and together we will be wildebeests. Only with a better metaphor, probably.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The rinsing makes the difference for me: second day hair is different from fresh-washed, but second-day rinsed is just as good. But I can see how hair structure and texture would make a huge difference on that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, Dennis and I met when I toured the campus, and we hit it off right then. Though I tried to reserve judgment in some ways, it was pretty clear that this was the college for me, and that Dennis was my advisor. I was a bit disgruntled, in fact, to find that the college's near-random assignment of freshman advisors (your first-term seminar prof was your advisor) was mandatory and could not be officially circumvented right away. Not that there was anything wrong with Stewart, but he was clearly not my advisor, and his priorities were not my priorities. (For example, he wanted to make sure I took enough foreign language to be Phi Beta Kappa eligible, and while it would have been nice to have more Japanese, it conflicted with E&M, and E&M won; to this day I would a million times rather be a person who knows a fair amount about electromagnetic theory than a person who has a Phi Beta Kappa key, although being a person who knows more Japanese is only maybe a hundredth as important as being a person who knows a lot of E&M rather than a millionth.)

So I went and talked to Dennis about my courses anyway: who was going to stop me? Not Dennis, and who else mattered?

I was also very protective of my lablings in the major, as my lab TAs were of me. This is the way of the world. At least of my world.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We had no recess as of middle school, but in grade school I hated the philosophies that made us stay outside in circumstances adults would never stand for.

The worst of swimming in high school was that I didn't have time to wash, only to rinse very briefly, since my next class was on the far side of the school and the swimming teacher based his ideas of how long it should take you to get ready on the premise that you were a boy with a crewcut. (This was the early-mid 1990s: nobody was a boy with a crewcut. Not even greykev, whose father certainly would have given him one if left free rein.) So I spent the whole quarter drippy and dry-skinned and stinking of chlorine. Also I did much of debate class with my head completely on one side to let the water out of my ears.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

My school had the same thing, and since I had signed up for "Who Killed Classical Music?" intending to get a nebulous Something out of it-- I still don't know what I expected-- and ended up with a keyboarding professor for my first year... yeah, those were interesting class discussions. Since my major requirements were already set, it was more about Spanish than anything.
"How did I do on the Spanish proficiency test?"
"You passed out of it, good for you."
"So what class do I take?"
"You don't have to, that's what it means."

I like our world.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

A lot of teachers, even gym teachers, have unrealistic expectations of how gym interacts with school. My father and one of his friends were complaining once about their students-- Dad's a good teacher, certified for absolutely everything, so he gets a lot of the catchall classes and is only now getting anything people want to take-- and one of their complaints was that some students wore their gym uniforms to class.
"Oh, some of mine don't even shower after gym!" Dad's friend said.
"Um," I interrupted. "Nobody does. There's no time, and they turned the water off anyway. I don't know anyone who has ever showered after gym, except for swimming."
It took a while to convince them.

I wouldn't have minded middle school recess if they'd done anything to make it appealing. "Go spend twenty minutes outside," means very little if the only thing to do outside is play basketball or soccer, if you brought your own ball. I was and remain perfectly fine as long as I have some playground equipment. Or even if they plow something in the winter, so everyone digs tunnels.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah. My mom was horrified, but nobody in my middle school or high school gym classes showered afterwards, except if they'd been swimming. No time, often no water, strongly socially discouraged.

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Very cold air was an issue when I was taking swimming lessons at the neighbourhood pool - about 20 minutes away walking on the short legs of a pre-schooler. We wore woven toques not hoods, so our hair stuck out, both through the yarn and the edges, and froze to crackling stiffness. This was novel and interesting, but also somewhat uncomfortable when it came to taking the hat off when we got home.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I remember this discomfort, yes.