My ego spent approximately fifteen minutes burrowed underground today, in between giggling girls crawling about on my lap, hanging off my arms, splashing me at the olympic pool.
I used to do eighty laps a day, every day except Fridays and Saturdays, in that pool. That's two kilometres. Daily.
At some point today, I disentangled myself from the free-swim zone and left the girls giggling with their dad, took a deep breath and dove in.
I was winded before the end of my first lap. My arms were aching, my lungs heaving. I looked up and saw how far the end was and despaired. I pushed, got there, sat up on the side and berated myself for a solid few minutes, went through the old mantras, the s-stroke, the cupped hands, the timing -- four kicks to every arm rotation, four arm rotations to every breath, practiced the rythm of all of it in my head and jumped back in.
I made it four laps, a weakling front crawl, but enough to impress a swimmer beside me into firing up a conversation later on, and finished the fourth lap with that familiar feeling.
The wanting to puke feeling from the first time I tried to make eighty laps.
That first time, we'd been training for six weeks, sprints, lifeguard style, fifty metres under a certain set time limit, then twenty five more carrying a person with us, holding their shoulders above water.
Those last twenty five were always brutal, the way my own head would sink just to push their shoulders high enough, the way my legs couldn't paddle efficiently with someone else's trailing between them, the way I needed both my arms to hold the other person just above the elbows, pushing them inward and upward to support the body.
The first time I tried eighty laps, I made it seventy or so of them and decided that the coach couldn't possibly have kept count. I climbed out, slipping back in twice because my arms were too shaky to push myself all the way out.
Then I kneeled beside the pool, heaving, ready to puke up all the water I'd swallowed when I'd lost the rythm of my breathing.
I hadn't learned the trick of hyperventilating before diving in yet, to allow myself to go longer in between gulps of air. It's a nasty trick, too, with a sketchy line that if you cross you end up passing out halfway through your first lap and an angry bunch of swimmers having to pull you back out. It never happened to me, but I remember my first hands-on AR experience with someone on our team. She never came back after that week, either.
So I'm doubled over by the pool and the unmistakable veiny feet of the coach appear and all I hear is that incredibly stern voice, the voice that was a nightmare for eight months until the day of the exam when I realized that he'd prepared us better than anyone had before, when the examiner left with tears in his eyes at the caliber of the lifeguards he'd just graduated.
And all he says is: "If you puke now, you're doing another eighty laps until you can do it right."
Lemme tell you, I never puked.
And I sure as hell appreciated it, a few weeks down the road when I had to carry my first unconscious fat man to the too-high wall of the deep end and lift him out.
In the meantime, today I could barely manage a hundred metres.
Maybe I can spend this time off getting my souffle back, turning that bathing suit into something a little less tight around the thighs.
Maybe I can push myself on that bike all the way to the pool, and work myself up to at least forty laps.
Maybe.
And while I'm at it, I'll forget the look on David's face while I consider that job offer in Calgary. Massive machines, Unix systems all of them, and them desperate for a C coder who knows their way around shellscript.
Right up my fucking alley, the only thing missing on my CV was XML, and that's just because I'm only vaguely comfortable with it.
I'm definitely going to wait before I think about it, but...
Calgary has a couple of good things about it. Lake Louise, and Banff. And all the drinking buddies I've got working at those ski hills all winter long, all willing to turn me back into the sleekest thing on the slopes.
Could be worth it, could be the change I've been aching for, but I'm not sure...
...I'm not sure that's where I was pointing my life. Sure, I'm young, and a year of mucking about in the snowcaps is one hell of a way to make it to the quarter century mark, and last time I stayed in Montreal rather than lose a year was the year I turned down the scholarship to Waterloo...
But there's going to be a lot of thinking before I go there.
A lot.
In the meantime, I'm achin' again, but it's a good, healthy, muscle-sore ache.
And Olivia can now do the front crawl without any help from her dad. Hey, at least I accomplished something this week...