Swimming for me is mainly not drowning. When I started doing thirty laps— half a mile, five times a week— I had no form, no stroke. It was This Wall to That Wall, the floor deep beneath me and deep on the edges so that for half an hour there was no touching the ground. I didn’t ask myself to swim well, to swim quick, to look decent; just to get to the other wall. I knew I couldn’t cheat, knew that I touched the wall thirty times because for twenty-nine of them I pushed back off of it, and for the thirtieth I pulled myself from the water with the last of my effort and turned mid-pull to sit on the edge of the pool and catch my breath.
It took a free membership to get me into a gym, and each day when I enter I pass by the weights and the track and the courts and into the elevator down four floors to where there is only the pool. I won’t even take the stairs. I am the only person in the pool without goggles and a swim-cap, and the only one wearing board shorts. People tell me that the baggy swim-suit full of pockets and places for the water to slow me down is making the swim harder, which I consider to be fine since I’m not breaking any records, except maybe Worst Form. I’m just getting to the other wall.
After my swim I shower with gym-issued generic soap and a bottle of travel-sized conditioner purchased at Duane Reade. For thirty minutes afterwards my hair is wet, then flakily dry. I smell like chlorine even when I wake up the next day. My towel and bathing suit grow moldy throughout the week in a locker which I didn’t pay for but which is mine simply because I put a lock on it, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. I am a squatter— both in the ‘pillaged locker’ sense and also stylistically, in the pool. When I’m too tired to do the classic stroke (which should be called breast-stroke but is actually called freestyle) I sort of squat, pumping my legs. The form is irrelevant— my only rule is to touch the opposite wall fifteen times.
I’ve never been a gym guy because paying the gym-fees never made sense, since you can just do like push-ups or jog for free. And yet, I never do push-ups or jog. I find exercising painfully boring, and never once accessed that alleged state of euphoria which exercisers talk about in reverent tones, once they push beyond the point where the body tells them to stop and transcend. This experience has always sounded hollow to me— delusional, even. I eye it as suspiciously as other “transcendent” experiences, like going to raves every weekend, or watching the movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. I’ve tried it, and it doesn’t seem fun. If my body asks me to stop, I really don’t mind stopping.
Part of me thought that exercisers were multi-tasking— that while they ran they came up with ideas for Substack, planned out their week, or worked through awkward conversations they had the day before. Maybe some of them do, but my inner monologue while swimming is far less luxurious and productive. It mainly consists of a voice screaming which lap I’m on over and over again until I reach the other side. It sounds like SEVENTEEN SEVENTEEN SEVENTEEN SEVENTEEN HOLY SHIT WATCH OUT FOR THAT GUY SEVENTEEN SEVENTEEN. One time I memorized a quote from Ulysses to try and repeat while I swam, but it didn’t last long. DO NOT TEAR ASUNDER WHAT GOD HATH CONJOINED; DO NOT TEAR ASUNDER WHAT GOD HATH— EIGHTEEN EIGHTEEN EIGHTEEN EIGHTEEN.
I think the reason why swimming works for me, why I don’t get bored or, if I do, I don’t stop, is because of the sheer amount of work required to get there in the first place. The lugging of a towel around the city, the awkward mid-day shower, the searching for the least-crowded lane— it takes so much effort to actually get into the pool that, if on lap #20 I feel like stopping, I just have to remind myself of all the logistics which got me here in the first place. I reason that I might as well just hit the quota, putting no stress on how I do it, only asking that I get to the other wall and back enough times to justify the process.
It’s annoyingly undeniable that on days where I swim I feel better than on days where I don’t. The annoying part is not that the Exercisers were right this whole time, but that on days where I don’t swim I am highly aware of feeling lethargic and shitty. I’ve felt lethargic and shitty for like twenty years, and was always fine with it. I’m like one of those people who stop eating gluten and can suddenly play chess really well and find beauty in the sunlight— except the only problem is that they love muffins. In this analogy, “loving muffins” is “not wanting to exercise.” There persists in me a whingeing toddler, every single time I head towards Uris Pool, crying out “but I don’t waaaaaant to.” And by the way yeah, it’s called Uris pool. Like Urine Pool. Which is probably more accurate than I want to imagine.
Here’s the thing about swimming that you don’t get with sit-ups, dead-lifts, jogging, curls, bench-presses or whatever the thing with the ropes is— you get to fly. It’s not lost on me as I coast across the lane that the ground is sixteen feet below, that I’m suspended above air. There’s an element of mysticism to that, and for someone who gets consistently angry at gravity, it’s liberating.
In the elevator after every swim me and the other swimmers complain about how crowded the Urine Pool is. It’s like talking about the weather while ignoring the fact that the person you’re talking to is God, and controls the weather. Sometimes we swim four to a lane, which is frankly ridiculous. After each lap you have to pause, holding on to those poorly designed lane separators and assess where the person in front of you is and if it’s your turn. The legitimate swimmers are deeply annoyed by this, but for us rookies it’s a gratifying excuse to breathe for a second before taking your next lap. It must be especially annoying if you’re one of those swimmers who likes to do the flip / push off the wall move, but the one time I tried that I banged an ankle against the rim of the pool and had water in my ears for three days. One time a guy asked if I was gonna do back- or breast-stroke, so we could decide who should go first. “I honestly didn’t know those were different,” I responded, and he shook his head in disappointment.
A few days ago I shared a lane with a Real Swimmer. I thought I knew what that was, having studied a few folks in Urine in attempts to improve my craft. I had no idea. In the time it would take me to cross the 25-yards, this guy would have swam down to the other end and back to where we started. By the time I would turn and prepare for my next lap, he would already be halfway down the lane I just completed. His launches off the wall carried him at least a third of the lap, and I started watching underwater just to see how he did it. What I saw was not human— he would wield his two legs like a single fin, and upon re-surfacing would burst out of the water mid-stroke. He did the one where you come out of the water super high and then go back down— it’s called the Butterfly but it should be called the Dolphin. I would hear him coming from behind, turn over my shoulder mid-lap, and see this guy soaring above me with his arms stretched out. It was fucking terrifying.
And inspiring. I don’t think I had a concept of what really good swimming looked like— I knew I wasn’t close, but couldn’t fathom just how far I was. This guy probably wasn’t even a professional, and the idea that someone like Michael Phelps would make him look slow was hard to comprehend. I reached my thirtieth lap that day with a medley of Puppy-Dog laps and a stroke I won’t describe but which I call the Otter. I hauled myself out of the pool and saw that I finished a full five minutes earlier than usual, inspired by this dude making me look like a child with floaties on. As I walked along the edge of the pool to my towel I caught the fish-man in our lane, still at it, doing the Butterfly. And but from this perspective, walking at a normal pace, he suddenly looked puny and slow. His launches out of the water were impressive, but not nearly as towering and awe-inspiring as I would have thought. I was struck with the realization that no matter how talented a swimmer is, he is an unnatural thing— a human being in water. At its very best, swimming is nothing but tearing asunder what God hath conjoined.
I keep making a plan to watch swimming videos online in order to study form and increase my performance. The thing is, though, that I’m not very concerned with increasing my performance. The only requirement I have of myself is that I get to the opposite wall, thirty times. I may actually be getting more of a work-out by NOT improving my style— I’m at least spending more time in the water, utilizing a wider range of muscles and working much harder to do each lap. I don’t yet have that Love Of The Game which inspires one to learn how to do something better— for me, it’s just business.
If you catch me this week at Urine pool, likely in the lane at the far end, the one I try to snag early and share with the seventy-year-old neuroscientist who cradles three floating boards and angrily splashes anyone who passes him— don’t laugh. I’m not going to by a speedo anytime soon, and it’ll be a bitter day when it actually looks like I know what I’m doing. And if you see me afterwards in the shower, please remember: the pool is cold.