I’m bobbing gently off the west coast of Maui. Cheryl, pregnant with our first child, waits in the shade under a palm by the volcanic rocks defining one side of this little bay. My mother, who bought at a charity auction this week’s stay at a condo here at the new resort of Wailea, lounges with my sister back in their room, hoping someone else will make them breakfast.
Surrounded by my family, I start swimming across to the opposite arm of rocks, about a quarter mile away. I go 20, 40, 60 strokes and more. There is no wall to reach, no pool sides to cling to, no walls around or above me. The air and water are both about 80F – just about perfect. I can see the rippling sand far below, way to far to stop and stand on. Iridescent purple and yellow tropical fish zoom by or float lazily along beneath me.
With sudden clarity, a thought whizzes in my head: THIS is why I spent all those years, going back and forth … back and forth, day after day, year after year, in swimming pools. Outside in the sun in the summer. Indoors, in chlorine fogged, claustrophobic, grungy tiled gym basements where pools were built in the early part of the last century. Enduring defeat, humiliation, and profound tiredness just to be a member of the swim team, usually the slowest one, usually without any hope to distinguish myself as an accomplished athlete.
There must have been SOME reason I was doing that, for ten years or more, some reason I was drawn to slogging up and down the lane lines. I never did find out why, so I quit half way through my senior year of college. That’s not fair; I actually left college after the first semester that year, having finished all graduation requirements, and saw no reason to continue on through another New England winter. But I quit the swimming team before I officially quit school, so it had a sense of giving up at the time. Giving up to freedom. The week after I stopped daily practice, I discovered how it felt not to be tired between 5 PM and bedtime.
Over the next ten years, I found myself in and out of pools, drawn back to them for the pleasure of exercise. I discovered the pull-buoy, and so could swim a semblance of freestyle, in addition to the breaststroke I had more naturally come to all my life. The “skills” never left me, so I always felt confident and comfortable in the water, knowing I could swim a mile or two any time, anywhere I wanted.
But there off Wailea Beach, I instantly realised just WHY I had been swimming all those years. It was so I could hop in water like this, in a place like this, and swim FREE, literally no restrictions as to direction, distance, or effort. I was supremely confident that I could handle this freedom, anywhere I might find it. Off course, the languid water, lacking any waves or swell, surrounded by Haleakala on one side and the Mauian archipelago on the other, clear and filled with aquarium quality water life, made it all so easy.
Triathlon is basically a vain attempt to return to the pleasures of childhood. Riding a bike, swimming in the local pool in the summer, running races on the playground – all conjure a sense of freedom, a lack of structure that we start to lose around age 12 or so. Triathlon can’t really bring that feeling back, not with the rules, and the crowds, and the finish line, and the structured training.
But in the summer, especially, I can bring up hints. Popping into a reservoir or lowland lake, with a clear sky and calm surface, I can bridge the open sense of discovery of youth, and the sensuous pleasure of Hawaiian west coast waters.
So, despite the $3 a day I pay to the YMCA for the privilege of swimming in their 21st century pool – a really very nice one, with saline (not chlorine), wave sucking lane lines and zero rise end walls, and floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides – I have done all my swimming outside since I returned from Colorado. Our local lake is Horseshoe (actually, shaped more like a mitten), and I intend to go there every day it’s nice, hopefully until I return to Colorado in September (where I swim outside in the Snowmass pool). Then, its 2+ weeks on the Big Island, so I may not get into an indoor pool between May 15 and Oct 15 – five months of outdoor swimming, more than half of it in the FreeSwim Zone.
Without those five months outside, I don’t think I could be a swimmer. I have to stop now. Cheryl and I are packing for Horseshoe. Today, it’s set to be 80F, no clouds, and on the lake, small as it is and rimmed by tall fir and hemlock, no waves. Almost like Hawaii. Just need someone to dump in a few tropical fish for local color. Aloha!