It’s about five weeks since I ended my post-Catalina sulk and crawled back into the primordial soup that fills the pool at Edward Health and Fitness Center.

I’ve never been fast, but marinating in the lake all summer turned me into more of a barnacle than a swimmer.

For the first couple of weeks of my “return”, I averaged about 1m 35s per 100 SCY. That’s swimming time, not total interval, and with a rest of about 25 seconds in between each 100!!

I felt slappy and uncoordinated, and would have looked it too, had my practices not been performed in secret.

I’ve got a history of being a giver-upperer, but this time was different. I persisted with my agonizingly ugly workouts and finally made a breakthrough this week!

I went to the pool last night after eating a roast chicken dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy. 2000 yards seemed like a goal and I did 4 x 500 yds of swimming. The first 500 was half drill, the second was half backstroke, but the third was 500 yards of real swimming all in a row! all 500 yards joined up end to end!! I don’t remember the last 500 because I was dizzy.

Today was even more magnificent. I swam an actual Sewickley Seadragons, Lane B workout, and stuck to the intervals-for the first time in well over a year. There were 400’s and 200’s. I made one of my 200’s in 3 minutes!

Going from stationary to merely prodigiously slow never felt so good.