Pooling

I've been swimming a lot lately. It's calming in a nicely repetitive way, like riding a bike, or mowing the lawn. I'm starting to get pretty good, and have usually been able to keep up with even the serious-looking swimmers to the sides of me - until two days ago, when the girl next to me who may or may not have had an invisible rocket strapped to her back, kept gliding by me at what seemed to be twice my speed. She was going as fast or faster than I was even when she was using a kickboard (i.e. no hands). I shrugged it off, as she appeared to be one giant muscle in the shape of a small-ish redhead, except that other people in the pool seemed to be going faster than me as well. Same thing yesterday. Now, it's not that big a deal, except that when people are blowing by you, you really become aware of your own lack of speed and the large number of laps you have to do to make swimming a worthwhile exercise - well, each one feels long, and each set of ten feels longer, and then each half mile takes forever. Maybe I just need to focus more. That would make sense, I have been having trouble focusing for the course readings. In that case, though, I just figured that laziness was the culprit.

I won't be swimming for a couple days, at least until I can find new trunks. My once dark green swimming trunks - which had, thanks to repeated exposure to the most poisonously chlorinated water I've ever swam in, turned a sort of peach-y color - developed a tiny hole on one of the legs. I had to cut my laps short yesterday, as somehow that tiny hole had developed into a gigantic rip. I slammed the shorts into the locker room trash can, and I'm pretty sure that I had a frustrated and/or perturbed look on my face as I was doing it.