The Asser Levy Rec Center, at E 23rd and FDR Drive, has a 3-lane outdoor pool that opens for lap swimming at 7 in the morning. It is reachable via the M23 crosstown bus. As the bus heads east, the number of people on the bus in hospital greens increases steadily. They all get off at 1st Avenue, and head in to work at the VA hospital. It’s another 1-avenue walk to the rec center.
I arrived at 7:10. There are 2 entrances, 1 marked “Women,” the other marked “Men.” From 23rd Street, you see the women’s entrance first, but I walked past it, figuring there was a reason for the gender distinction – maybe the doors led directly to the locker rooms. The men’s entrance, however, was blocked off. Turns out everyone is supposed to go in through the women’s door. I didn’t ask.
“It’s my first time here,” I said to the guy at the front desk. “Where do I need to go?”
“Do you have a lock?”
“No.” The gym where I swim at home has loaner locks. I hadn’t thought about it. The $50-a-day Chelsea Piers facility may have loaner locks, but I wouldn’t know. I haven’t stopped by to check out the view yet. On second thought, maybe they don’t have loaner locks. Maybe they just sell locks at a steep markup.
“There’s a CVS on 1st Avenue.” Where I had just come from, pretty much right there at the bus stop where I had gotten off the M23. “Get one with a key,” the front-desk guy said. “Don’t get a combination.”
I walked back, bought the only lock in the store with a key (which, inexplicably was to be found in the stationery section, at the end of a long row of Hallmark cards that managed to look cheerful even at 7 am, before coffee, under the disturbing green glow of fluorescent lighting). The lock cost $9.73, with tax. By the time I returned to the rec center, it was closer to 7:30.
When I’m in an unfamiliar locker room, I usually pick locker 69. It’s easy to remember. But 69 was already taken, so I chose number 153 instead. It was by a window, which is also easy to remember, but not quite as easy as 69, because triggering the by-a-window memory requires you to use a different, less-frequently accessed part of your brain. I live in fear of some day stashing my clothes, my ID, my keys, and my iPhone in a strange locker and spending hours wandering around, essentially naked, wearing nothing but a wet towel wrapped around my waist, trying to find my stuff, occasionally being tricked into passing a mirror and having to confront what my body looks like from the outside. It’s not quite at the level of a recurring nightmare.
I changed, showered, and headed downstairs to the pool, the key to my locker tied onto the string of my bathing suit, which, having been designed for racing, didn't have a pocket. I hadn’t had any reason before to notice my suit’s lack of key-storage space. The lock I use at the gym where I normally swim is a combination lock.
The Asser Levy pool isn’t rectangular; it’s diagonal at one end. Different lanes are different lengths. I picked the long lane, which, I later found out, is 40 yards long. Usually lanes are 25 or 50 yards, or 25 or 50 meters. Swimming in a 40-yard lane felt odd; I never knew when to expect the wall to appear. I also kept running into the side of the pool. I can’t explain this, it just happened.
I didn’t know the lane was 40 yards long till after I finished swimming and asked the pool attendant, who sits at a table at the non-diagonal end of the pool and checks people in. (The pool is free, but you have to register and be issued a green card – really, a green City of New York Parks & Recreation Adult-lap Swim Program Admission Card Season Pass, credit-card-sized, with a coated surface so it won’t disintegrate when it gets wet. You print and sign your name on in. In the upper-right-hand corner, the pool attendant has hand-written a number that uniquely identifies you. I’m number 647.)
“Do you know how long the pool is?” I asked, reclaiming my green card from the attendant after finishing my swim.
“No, but I know that 44 lengths is a mile.”
“44? Really? The long lane?”
“44.”
I decided to wait till I got back to my hotel room to calculate the actual length of the lane. 44, I could readily see, was divisible by 11. No way that 5,280, a sequence of digits burned into my brain since 2nd or 3rd grade as the number of feet in a mile, was going to be evenly divisible by 11. The lane length, I was quite certain, was going to stretch to infinity in some bizarre pattern of repeating decimals.
I was wrong. 5,280 is evenly divisible by 44, exactly 40 times. No decimals. Who knew there was a factor 11 lurking in there?
So I can now tell you that, although I didn’t swim any 50s or 100s, I did swim a couple of 80-yard laps of freestyle, and a couple of 40-yard lengths of butterfly. That was close enough to feel like I hadn't backslid too badly since my previous swim, a few days earlier.
Oh, and here’s one more number: 30. Which is 10 less than 40. 30, a friend informed me after reading about my recent trip to WeightWatchers, is the actual number of pounds I have almost lost since my first weigh-in 4 years ago. Not 40. 30.
40 is the length, in yards, of the long lane at the Asser Levy Rec Center pool.
Also: 647 is not evenly divisible by 11.
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