They said it would happen.  They said it would just magically happen.  Today, I think it might have happened.  It didn’t feel magical, angels didn’t sing, but there was definitely a leap forward.

It was 75 degrees, noon, and I was very tired of five hours working on a complex analysis for a client.  Five hours of trying to make heads, or tails, of a stack of invoices literally as large as a ream of paper and diligently building a spreadsheet that would somehow tell me a story of what is going on in this particular part of their business.  What kind of story we won’t know for at least a week due to the number of invoices and data that has to be entered.  It was just the motivation I needed to take a break and go to the pool for another try at this swimming thing.

The pool featured perfect weather and I had it all to myself.  With wetsuit zipped up I slid forward into the water, relaxed, and told myself to wait until I was floating.  I did.  Then I began the strokes.  Calm, slow, even, and focused on a long extension before the pull.  Before I knew it, I was at the other side and I had barely increased my heart rate.  I turned and continued the same pattern just trying to relax and keep calm.  I turned again, and again, and so on as my Garmin Fenix 3 HR counted every lap using the space age gps I paid dearly for.  It was happening.  I was swimming.  Swimming not for survival, but because I could.

After 400m, I rested.  By this time my form had fallen apart and my breathing pattern deteriorated.  All the same, I had just swum farther than I had ever gone before.  A win.  A step forward.

After catching my breath, I began again like I started the session with floating and a calm demeanor.  I was rewarded with another 400m of relatively uninterrupted swimming.

Usually, 800m takes me a little less than an hour to complete due to the continual stopping to gather more oxygen and moments of thinking why I am putting myself through this torture of learning something new at such an advanced age when I could just be golfing.  This time, with my one big pause at the end of the first 400m, I completed it in just over 25 minutes.  Cut it in half.  It was a good day.  Hope continues to grow.