Cross Training

To increase my stamina for the 200 fly, I decided to take up cycling.

So now, instead of sleeping in on Saturday mornings, I get up at 6:00 am, kiss my partner D. goodbye, and head out for a 4-hour training ride with AIDS Life Cycle (ALC).

The series of rides I’ve been doing is called the Fall Crawl. It’s for slow people who don’t really know what they’re getting themselves in for. (They also have a Fall Haul, for faster people, who do.)

All the rides follow some version of the same basic route. They start in the San Francisco Presidio, cross the Golden Gate Bridge, make their way to Sausalito, wind around to Tiburon and then loop back to the starting point. Each week, the route gets 4 miles longer, and noticeably hillier.

My first ride, a couple of weeks ago, was 30 miles long. It was advertised as “mostly flat.” This meant there was only one monster hill, the Sausalito hill, which climbs for about a mile and a quarter up out of Sausalito to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I cruised down this hill at the beginning, and then spent the rest of the ride trying to appreciate the scenery: shorebirds along the path where it wound through wetlands; shifting changing views of San Francisco and Mt. Tamalpais that peeked through the trees at various points along the route, the back muscles of the riders in front of me. Enjoying the scenery was far more pleasant than the alternative: worrying about riding back up the Sausalito hill. At the end. After I’d already ridden 25 miles.

There is a ferry from Sausalito to San Francisco, with a large bike rack to accommodate cyclists who have better sense than to try riding up the Sausalito hill. The ferry has a small bar that serves alcohol. My secret plan going into my first Fall Crawl ride was to declare myself too tired to climb the Sausalito hill and to take the ferry back to San Francisco. I told my dyke friend Judy, who was riding with me, about my plan. She said, “It might be better to think that you can make it up the hill, instead of thinking you can’t.” Judy did the ALC ride last year. She’s been trying to get me to go on weekend rides with her ever since. Normally, though, Judy wouldn’t be doing the Fall Crawl rides. Or the Fall Haul rides, for that matter. They’re too short for her. And she doesn't like to go that slowly.

Toward the end, Judy had to peel off from the ride before we got back to the Sausalito hill. She wasn’t tired. Unlike some people, she didn’t need to hurry home and take a 3-hour nap. She simply had to climb the hill more quickly than I could, because she had a presentation to give that afternoon and didn’t want to be late. When she took off, she left me in the capable hands of the ALC ride leaders, whose motto is: No-one gets left behind on our rides.

“Don’t worry,” Logan, one of the ride leaders, said. “We’ll talk you up the hill.”

The Sausalito hill is really a series of five hills. The ride leaders tell you this ahead of time because they think it will make you feel better to know that there’s a short stretch of flat road between inclines. Talking you up the hill means that one of the ride leaders rides behind you and shares encouraging information, like, “the top of this hill is just around that curve. Then you get a break.”

They also ask you how you’re doing and make you answer them, so they know you’re not about to pass out. You’re not supposed to be panting too heavily to answer them. If you are, they tell you you’re working too hard and need to slow down, even if you’re barely moving.

“How’re you doing, Camo?” Dan, the ride leader who had assigned himself to me, asked me near the top of hill 3. Hill 3 is the worst of the 5. Hill 1 is steeper, but mercifully short; hill 3 is both too steep and too long. On hill 1, it’s over before you realize what’s happening. On hill 3, you know what’s happening. It’s called oxygen deprivation.

By the time I was halfway up hill 3, I had already downshifted to my lowest gear. At the point at which Dan checked in with me, my forward motion would have been detectable only by very sensitive instruments. I was breathing heavily.

“O…,” I panted. “kay,” I panted.

“You’re almost there,” Dan said, his statement comforting not so much for its information content as because hearing Dan’s voice gave me something to focus on other than my fantasy of pulling over, collapsing in a puddle on the side of the road and whimpering.

When you get to the top of the hill 5, you find yourself at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. You’d think that riding over the Golden Gate Bridge would be a treat. And there are treat-like moments. But not many. It takes about 5 minutes to cross the bridge. Of this, you get between 15 and 30 seconds to enjoy the view. It’s not that there’s nothing to see. It’s spectacular: the city, Alcatraz Island, sailboats on the bay, cargo ships steaming under the bridge, the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean stretching to the horizon. Most of the time, however, you’re too busy gripping your brake handles, gritting your teeth and performing intricate swerving maneuvers to avoid crashing into tourists. Tourists like to ride bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge. They come in two forms: those riding directly in front of you, who stop suddenly, without warning; and those riding toward you in the opposite direction, who wobble and veer onto your side of the bike path, also without warning. On special occasions, you get to experience both at once.

That wasn’t my biggest problem with the bridge, though. At the top of the Sausalito hill, there’s a right turn onto the bike path. It’s important that you not miss this turn. Normally a newbie like me would have a ride leader on hand to say, “Turn here.” But somewhere on the way up hill 5, Dan, figuring that I was doing reasonably well and that I’d probably be okay on my own, dropped back to turn his attention to another newbie who was having a harder time than I was.

So when I got to the turnoff to the bike path, I went straight instead of turning right and found myself on the main roadway, with cars whizzing past me at 40 miles an hour.

There is a 4-foot-high fence separating the roadway from the bike path. The bottom foot or so is solid metal. Above that are several horizontal braided steel cables, about 5 inches apart, anchored every few feet by vertical posts. The whole thing is topped by a 3-inch-diameter cylindrical metal railing. I noted, briefly, that the entire fence, even the cables, was painted the same rust-red color as the bridge. “How lovely,” I thought. “Such attention to detail.” Then I focused on my predicament.

I had two choices. I could walk my bike backwards, against traffic, on what was essentially a freeway with no shoulder. Or I could climb the fence. With my bike. I chose the fence. I was fully aware that this was a crazy thing to do. But the cars looked very big, and fast, and heavy, and mean.

It’s not easy to lift your bike over a 4-foot-high fence, particularly after riding up the Sausalito hill. It’s even more difficult, once you’ve lifted your bike to the other side of the fence, to keep it from falling while you climb the fence yourself. Climbing the fence is tricky: it involves performing a modified tightrope act on the braided metal cables, which sway when you put your weight on them, threatening to toss you back onto the roadway. But fear helps.

Safely back on the bike path, I made my way to the nearby parking lot, where I ran into Dan. “I wondered where you went,” he said. He thought I had probably finished the ride on my own. I told him what I’d actually done. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.

For those considering cycling as a form of exercise, here are some lessons I’d like to share:

1. Lärabars taste better than Cliff bars.
2. Even if you’re not a young, fit 20-something, it is possible to reach down, grab a water bottle out of its holder, take a drink and replace the bottle, without crashing, but it’s best to practice in an abandoned parking lot first. Alternatively, spring for a CamelBak.
3. If you want to enjoy the view from the Golden Gate Bridge, walk across it.
4. Being a sissy is not necessarily incompatible with being athletic, but engaging in strenuous athletic activity doesn’t necessarily make you stop thinking of yourself as a sissy.
5. If given a choice between riding on a bike path and riding on a shoulderless freeway, go with the bike path.

Drinking Lake Tahoe, or Learning to Fly, Part II

Here’s the good thing about swimming butterfly in Lake Tahoe: when you inhale water (more on this in a moment), it doesn’t taste like chlorine.

Here’s the bad thing about swimming the fly in Lake Tahoe: the lake is 6225 feet above sea level. You might consider this another good thing, because it’s in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by magnificent granite peaks. And if all you’re doing is admiring the scenery, that too is a good thing.

If you’re swimming, however, maybe all that mountain scenery isn’t such a good thing. Because, unless you head for one of the local oxygen bars, there’s significantly less oxygen available at 6200 feet than there is at sea level, where I spend most of my life – and do most of my swimming.

I began my dip in the lake with a little breaststroke, a little freestyle. Delightful. The water was a refreshingly cool antidote to the hot, sunny, early fall afternoon. I graduated to a few short butterfly drills, nothing too strenuous. All seemed fine.

Emboldened, I took off, flying out into the heart of the lake, as if I could swim the entire 12-mile distance to the opposite shore. I cruised for maybe 30 or 40 yards, concentrating on form, gliding underwater as far as possible after each stroke, eyes open, admiring the patterned reflections of sunlight shimmering in bright yellow ribbons across the sandy lake bottom, and marveling at the straining back muscles of the athletic young guy rowing a kayak that flashed momentarily into view as I breeched the surface for air.

Then I realized my mistake. No, not getting distracted by kayak guy. My other mistake.

The reason doing the 200 fly is a challenge is because the breathing is hard. You can butch it up and force yourself to do 50 yards. Maybe even 100. But not 200. You run out of air, plain and simple. What you do after that can be described in many different ways, but it would be stretching the definition of the sport to call it swimming.

Up above 6000 feet, you run out of air a lot sooner than 200 yards. At least I did.

Fortunately, the shoreline at Sand Harbor Beach drops off gently, so after a brief thrashing spell, I had propelled myself far enough back toward shore to touch bottom. I don’t think the guy in the kayak even noticed. He was too busy showing off for the pair of bikinied young women he was towing through the water behind his kayak.

The reason I was drinking lake water, however, has to do with my second lesson with Shinji, my Total Immersion instructor, in which he taught me how to integrate breathing into the butterfly.

For starters, Shinji had me stand in waist-deep water. “Now bend over,” he said. I bent over, stopping a few inches from the water.

“All the way over,” he said. “Until your nose and lips are touching the water.” I bent over further.

“Now breathe,” he said. I drank pool water.

“This is where your face should be when you breathe,” Shinji said, reinforcing his point, making sure there wasn’t any misunderstanding.

“But I get more water than I do air,” I said.

Shinji wasn’t overly concerned. “You drink about a liter of water every time you swim,” he said. “That’s normal,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

Maybe. But it’s going to take a while before sticking my face in the water and inhaling feels normal.

I tried various approaches and found one that worked. Sort of. I put my nose and lips on the surface of the water, stretching my lips back as far as I could, so that they were closed in front but open at the sides, and sucked in air. I shared my discovery with Shinji.

“Good,” he said.

Then he taught me how to integrate the breathing with the rest of the stroke. Theoretically.

It’s simple really. All I have to do is to execute the power portion of my stroke, while simultaneously “snapping” my legs, so that I “rocket” my upper body far enough out of the water to lift my shoulders clear of the surface (which sets me up properly for the recovery), but as my body rises upward, to point my head downward, toward the water, so that my nose and lips graze the surface. Then it’s a simple matter of remembering, in the fraction of a second during which all this comes together, to inhale through the corners of my mouth, but to ignore, as I suck in large quantities of water, the mental alarm bells that warn me of impending death.

It’s a good thing it’s only October. I’ve still got eight and a half months to pull this off.

And by the way, according to Wikipedia, the elevation of Cologne is a mere 121 feet above sea level.

Learning to Fly, Part I

This past weekend I took my first lesson ever in how to swim the butterfly. It was an illuminating experience. I discovered that the stroke I’ve been executing for the past four years, the stroke I’ve been calling butterfly, the stroke I’ve swum in several Masters meets without being disqualified, is only a vague approximation of the stroke that’s going to get me to 200 meters.

So I’ve started over.

Particularly intriguing is that, although I’ve based my stroke on Total Immersion books and videos, and although my teacher was a Total Immersion instructor, what he taught me wasn’t what was in the books and videos.

“This is a new approach,” he said. “You’re only the third person I’ve taught it to.” The other two were his kids.

I should mention that the instructor was Shinji Takeuchi, the director of TI Japan, now teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. Shinji developed the TI approach to butterfly for the baby-boomer generation, the one that’s presented on the Betterfly for Every Body video. So when he says he’s come up with something better, it’s probably a good idea to pay attention.

Shinji’s approach is all about using as little effort as possible to move through the water, an admirable goal when doing the fly because otherwise, if you insist on, say, trying to go 200 meters, when you really only have enough energy for 100, at best, you look like an idiot. Worst case: you drown. Reducing my physical effort, increasing the distance I travel with each stroke, is something I’ve been working on for a while, and I thought I had made significant progress. Until I took a lesson with Shinji.

One of the things I’ve spent a lot a of time doing is body dolphins, wiggling myself through the water. That, apparently, is last year’s approach. Doing the fly efficiently is “not about undulation,” Shinji says.

The first thing Shinji taught me was the “Superman glide.” You push off the bottom of the pool – no, not the side; too much propulsion; it’s cheating – and with your hands out in front of you, you glide as far as you can. My first time, I go maybe 10 feet and drop to a standing position, gasping for air.

“See if you can go farther,” Shinji says. Eventually, I work my way up to where I can get across the pool in three glides. (It’s not until much later in the lesson that he tells me he can travel 18 yards like this.)

“My legs sink,” I complain.

“Make smaller bubbles,” Shinji says. Exhaling makes you less buoyant. Your legs are the first to go. “And you don’t need to exhale all the time.”

I try it. It works. I manage to get across the 25-yard pool in only two glides. Well, okay, not quite: I fall about 10 inches short. But here’s the curious thing. In the effort to extend the Superman glide, I have to figure out how to relax my entire body, because holding tension takes effort, and effort uses oxygen, and using oxygen makes me run out of breath, and running out of breath, ultimately, is what makes me have to stand up. Even “holding” my breath makes me run out of breath, because it takes effort to hold my breath. The trick is to relax and simply float, watching the tiles on the bottom of the pool glide slowly by, not worrying about whether you have enough air or not (your body will send you clear warning signals when it needs more), and occasionally blowing a few tiny bubbles.

The second drill is the new part. It doesn’t have a name yet. You push off, hands out in front of you and slightly to the sides, and using a very gentle flutter kick to keep you moving through the water, you press your head quickly down into the water and slightly forward, letting your hands move outward slightly and – this is the key – making sure you keep your hands at the surface. This is not the power portion of the stroke. That comes later. This is the setup.

What you’re supposed to feel when you press your head down into the water is the pressure of the water pushing back, forcing your head back to the surface. That’s what happens when you keep your hands at the surface. But of course, the first 10, or 15, or 20 times, I let my hands sink, so all I feel is my head going underwater and staying there. Shinji has me work on it standing in the water with my hands on the side of the pool, fixed, where they can’t move, and bobbing my head in and out of the water. I try it again in a floating position and, suddenly, it clicks into place.

Here’s why this matters: the hard part of the fly, the part that takes wears people out because it takes so much effort but doesn’t contribute much to moving you across the pool, is getting your head and shoulders out of the water, your head so that you can breathe, your shoulders so that you don’t have to drag your arms up through the water during recovery. If you incorporate into your stroke a move that uses the pressure of the water to push your head to the surface, you’re halfway there. Instead of trying to arch your back to bring your head and shoulders up out of the water, which takes a lot of muscular effort and wears you out, you’re conserving your energy, recruiting the physical behavior of water to do the work for you. Completely brilliant, and completely counter-intuitive. This is definitely not how I’ve been swimming the fly.

There was one more drill to learn, which is relatively old-school. This one also begins face down in the water, flutter-kicking gently for propulsion. “Put your hands at 2:00 and 10:00,” Shinji says, demonstrating from the pool deck. “Then move them to 4:00 and 8:00. Then back.” Here, the focus is on keeping your hands flat in the water, just below the surface, using as little effort as possible to move them back and forth. After a few lengths of that, it’s time to move on to lifting your hands out of the water for the return trip from 4 and 8 to 2 and 10.

That’s the easy part. Then you graduate to angling your hands, pushing the water downward slightly as you move your hands from 2 and 10 to 4 and 8, and – ready? – letting the water push your hands back upward on the return. The idea here is to let the water lift your hands to the surface, so that you have to use muscle power only to lift them from the surface into the air. It makes sense, but it’s very subtle, and more difficult than it seems. Half an hour later, when the lesson ends, I still haven’t gotten it to work.

There was more. Adding the kick. Attempting to breathe. Putting the various bits and pieces together into something that was supposed to resemble a complete stroke. All that went by in a blur. It’s all on video tape, but I’m afraid to watch it. For now, I’m going to stick with the three drills, as distinct and separate entities. Fortunately, I’ve got another lesson scheduled for next weekend.

Oh, and a word of advice. If you’re planning to try the Superman glide in your local pool, you might want to give the lifeguard a heads-up. What it looks like from the pool deck – Shinji had warned me this would happen; he was right – is that you’re lying in the water, face down, barely moving, with only an occasional small bubble or two escaping your lips. When the concerned young lifeguard came over this morning to see if I had died, wondering whether she was going to have to fish me out of the pool with a net, I was tempted to say I was pretending to be Superman, but I settled for: I’m okay. It’s a floating exercise.

Making Waves

Progress: I swam a 100 fly this morning.

I’m in DC now, visiting my sister, and I’ve been going to the pool with my brother-in-law, who swims every morning at 7:00. Yesterday I didn’t manage to get any farther than 25 yards at a time, but today I had a breakthrough.

Swimming the 100 wasn’t the breakthrough. Don’t get me wrong, it was exciting; I came very close to embarrassing myself thoroughly by shouting “Yes!” and pumping my fist in the air like an idiot, before a calmer interior voice prevailed and I chose instead to stand in the shallow water, hand perched on the side of the pool for support, panting quietly, while full consciousness returned.

But the breakthrough was finding a new level of integration in my stroke.

Since I was a little kid watching the Olympics on TV, I’ve loved watching people swim the butterfly, dreamed about being able to do it myself some day. But I’ve never had a lesson; no-one’s ever taught me how to do the stroke. I’ve learned what I know from gaping at other people, asking occasional questions, and studying Total Immersion (TI) videos, in particular the recently released BetterFly for Every Body, which has special tips for baby boomers, like me, foolish enough to think they can fly. (I don’t get a kickback for this, but TI makes more sense to me as an approach to swimming than any other method I’ve heard of, so I’m happy to spread the news.)

I started swimming seriously four years ago, when I turned 55. I had to do something. I was turning into a blimp, and just thinking about most other forms of exercise made me want to throw up. Two days after my 55^th birthday I joined a Masters team and started swimming two mornings a week, which I soon increased to three. I swam all four strokes, but my fly was a mess. It was good enough to get me 50 yards – I even did a 50 fly in the first meet I went to – but I was dead at the end.

About two years into my swimming “career,” I blew out my right shoulder, the result of 25 years of pushing around a little piece of plastic (otherwise known as a mouse) with my right hand while slumped at various precarious angles in a series of crappy chairs. I say my right shoulder, but it was actually a line of pain that ran from the top of my right jaw, just below my right ear, all the way down my neck, into my arm, then my hand and terminating in my thumb. It got so bad that I was unable to grip the steering wheel of a car or hold a sponge to wash dishes. The pain also had a second branch, which ran down along the outer edge of my shoulder blade to a spot on my right hip, roughly at the SI joint.

(Those of you under 30 who have not yet had this experience: I recommend looking into ergonomically sound work environments. And all that two-thumbed texting you’re doing on your phones, it’s going to catch up with you. I promise. You may think you’re invincible, but your body knows better. Our thumbs didn’t evolve to take that kind of abuse.)

As you might suspect, my “shoulder” pain made swimming the crawl somewhat difficult. Basically, all forward stroking was out, which nixed not only the crawl, but the breast stroke and the fly as well, although my physical therapist did say that I could do the backstroke in limited quantities, because if done properly, it would help open up my shoulder joint. So I did a lot of backstroke – for the record, I hate the backstroke – and a lot of kicking, and (this is where the fly comes back into the story) a lot of “body dolphins.”

A body dolphin is the basic body-wave motion at the core of the fly. Done right, it recruits the muscles that run along your spine, both in front and in back, and not much else. Exquisite efficiency. Think Flipper. In TI swimming, there are head-lead body dolphins, with your hands floating by your sides, and hand-lead body dolphins, with your hands out in front of you. In both exercises, your focus is on rippling your spine. TI focuses on pressing your chest into the water and releasing it, but I find it a more helpful internal image to think about the motion as starting from a spot about two inches below my navel. (No, not that spot.) This is also the spot from which, in tai ch’i, all motion in the body originates. And the spot from which, as the ergonomics expert I didn’t listen to 15 years ago told me, I should have been mousing. But if pressing your chest into the water works for you, don’t let me stop you.

When you start doing body dolphins, if you don’t know what you’re doing – I didn’t – you don’t go anywhere. There were actually a few occasions on which, in the early phase of my education, I went backwards. Mostly I remained stationary, or moved forward very slowly. But at least I wasn’t putting any strain on my right shoulder. Over time, I figured out how to wiggle my body through the water so as to achieve actual propulsion.

There was a catch, which I didn’t realize until much later, after my recent spinal surgery: wiggling your spine as a way of pushing yourself through the water involves two basic motions: flexion (the equivalent of bending forward, rounding your lower back), and extension (the equivalent of bending backward, arching your lower back). Because of chronic spinal problems that hadn’t yet made themselves fully apparent, my body didn’t do extension; my spine went from flexion to flat. If your goal is to swim butterfly, not being able to extend your spine, to arch your back, can be somewhat limiting.

Still, I did start to pick up the rhythm, the central wave, of the stroke. Or so I thought, until my shoulder got better and I tried to integrate my arms with what the rest of my body was doing. Then it all fell apart. I could do a wave; and I could do a stroke or two, but I couldn’t go back and forth. I’d push off from the wall, set up the wave, be cruising along just fine, hands out in front of me; I’d succeed in pulling my first stroke back through the water; but then, as soon as I tried to bring my arms up out of the water for the recovery, it would feel like I was dragging them up through a mile of concrete. The wave would fall apart, and I’d belly-flop down into the water, thrashing around for a while and hoping no-one was watching.

Fast forward: the breakthrough I made today was that I found a way to get from the wave into the first stroke without having the whole thing fall apart. I was able to set up a drill – three waves, then a stroke, three waves, another stroke – and keep the wave going smoothly as I transitioned in and out of the stroke, for the full 25-yard length of the pool. So while it may seem like doing a 100 fly was the day’s big victory, it was actually the minor accomplishment. The big victory was that I caught my first glimpse ever of the possibility of developing a fluid, fully integrated butterfly.

I think I’m going to celebrate with a mimosa. Maybe two. And then a nap. And it’s not even noon yet.

Chrissy Does Chelsea

I couldn’t resist. It was Sunday and I hadn’t swum in two days. The public pools didn’t have lap swimming till 11 am. I’d exposed my naked body to public view the night before. I had to swim, if only to convince myself that I was still making an effort.

So I dropped the 50 bucks for a day pass at Chelsea Piers. I figured: I’d saved 40 dollars the night before because D. and I, having opted for audience participation (see previous entry), hadn’t had to pay the $20-per-person ticket price to see Leaves of Grass. So really I was only paying $10 to use the Chelsea Piers athletic facility.

The plan was to arrive at 8, when the place opened, but any plan I make involving New York City public transportation usually goes awry at some point, and this one was no exception. And the path to the pool, if you approach on foot instead of driving in through the parking lot – who drives anywhere in Manhattan? – isn’t well-marked, so I had to wander around the building a bit before figuring out where I was supposed to go.

First I walked past the yachts. Big yachts. On one of them, a trim young blonde guy with Harvard crew good looks, in navy-blue slacks and a tapered bone-white sweater, was standing on deck. He smiled and waved at me as I passed by. I waved back, wondering if he was just being friendly or had something more in mind, but deciding not to embarrass myself, and mindful of the fact that I was on a mission, I kept walking.

At the front desk, I handed over my credit card, to which the attendant graciously posted a $50 charge, and was issued a robe. A lightweight, cotton, terry-cloth robe. So I guess the $50 buys you something. The robe had two advantages, I discovered. First, it kept me covered up on the roughly quarter-mile hike from the men’s locker room to the pool deck, along the second-floor elevated walkway (with Hudson River views) that runs above the first-floor sea of treadmills, elliptical trainers and rowing machines. Second, the robe had pockets, so it gave me someplace to put the key to my lock; I didn’t have to tie it onto the string of my bathing suit.

Locker 69 was available. I took that as a good omen.

The pool was everything about.com had promised, and more. Six lanes, each a familiar 25 yards long, each able to accommodate two swimmers before anyone had to start swimming in circles. Overcrowding was not an issue at 8:30 am on a Sunday morning in Chelsea. And the view was even more spectacular than I imagined it would be. The facility is on a pier, and the pool is at the far end, jutting out into the water, so the view isn’t just at one end, it’s on three sides.

I ended up in the lane all the way over on the river side of the pool, which was great for scenery, but did have one slight problem. Ladders stick out into the lane, so when you do the fly, if you pay more attention to your swimming than to the ladders, you occasionally smash your hand into one of them. But that’s what ice packs are for.

Still, I achieved two new post-surgical milestones: 200 yards of continuous freestyle and 75 yards of continuous fly. The freestyle was fine. I could have kept going past 200, but I wanted to focus on the fly. I did some 25s, a couple of 50s, with lots of resting in between, and then the 75. I was dead at the end. Pleasantly dead, but dead. And I had hit the half-hour mark, which for now I have defined as a sufficiently long workout to claim victory. It’s still only 10 weeks since my back surgery, so I’m giving myself lots of breaks. (Or making lots of excuses. Both perspectives are valid.)

Now I’m on my way to D.C. for a family visit. I’m writing this on the train. I grew up in the D.C. suburbs and my sister still lives there. I haven’t figured out yet how I’m going to swim while I’m there. But I still have my lock, from the CVS on 23^rd and 1^st, so I’m ready for whatever fate throws at me.

Except that my left foot, which was cramping a bit yesterday while I was swimming, is now killing me whenever I put weight on it. It feels like I’ve got a hairline fracture. I can’t think of any reason why I would have a hairline fracture. It was my hand I smashed into the ladder at the $50-a-day pool, not my foot, and my hand feels fine. Current plan: ice it when I get to my sister’s house; if that doesn’t work, massage it; if it still hurts, ignore it and hope the pain goes away by itself.

Getting old stinks.

Singing the Body Electric

Last night, D. and I went to see “Leaves of Grass” at the cell, an off-off-Broadway theater space in Chelsea. This may seem irrelevant to the process of getting ready for the Gay Games, but bear with me.

The production is a choreographed choral reading of several poems from Whitman’s epic, including “Song of Myself,” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” in which the author celebrates the joy of the physical senses and the beauty of the human body. Appropriately, throughout most of the production, the performers, five men and four women, are nude. They occasionally wear underwear, or wrap themselves in gauzy material for effect, or, as in one scene in which a woman mimes sunning herself outdoors, sport sunglasses. But mostly, they’re naked.

The online advertisement for the performance offered free tickets to audience members who volunteered to participate in the piece. Also nude.

“We have to.” (me)

“No, we don’t.” (D.)

“Okay, fine, I’ll do it. You can watch.”

“You really want to do this?”

“Yes.”

So we did.

Our role consisted of sitting in a particular spot in the audience, clothed, listening for the line, “For ever and ever,” which appeared near the end of the show, then standing up and waiting for further instructions. After a few seconds, Kesh, one of the performers, appeared, moving toward us, his arm outstretched in a beckoning gesture. D., who was closer, took Kesh’s hand. Since there weren’t any other hands readily available, I stood frozen, looking confused. Kesh nodded to me, inclusively, to get with the program, so I took hold of D’s hand. Kesh led us offstage and down a flight of darkened stairs.

“We’ll circle around the stage two times,” he said when we arrived in the basement, encouraging us to disrobe quickly so we didn’t miss our entrance. “There’s a line if you want to say it. ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’” D. and I nodded, repeating the line to commit it to memory.

I had barely finished stuffing my socks into my shoes before we were being whisked back upstairs, arms once again linked and raised high in the air. The stairs seemed even darker on the way back up. I could barely see where I was going, and unlike during my descent, when my hands had been free, now I couldn’t cling to the banister for support. On the plus side, I was so focused on not tripping I didn’t have to time to think about the fact that I was about to walk out on a New York off-off-Broadway stage, in front of a room full of strangers, naked. Me, the guy who can barely get himself to look in a mirror.

I had figured the stage would be dim, as it had been through much of the production. Wrong. This was the finale. The climax of the corporeal celebration. Full, bright white light. No subtlety. No shadows to hide in.

As promised, we circled the stage two times, D. holding Kesh’s hand; I holding D.’s; someone else, I didn’t see who, holding my other hand. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone, neither cast member nor audience member. Instead, I watched Kesh’s feet, trying to match my gait to his, to avoid either bumping into D. or lagging behind and breaking the flow of the action.

Suddenly, we stopped. I realized people were saying the line Kesh had told us about. I managed to chime in on “large,” half-mumbling the word. But then I found my voice and, projecting out into the world, I proclaimed, in unison with the cast, “I contain multitudes.” And it was over. Kesh led us offstage and back downstairs, where he gave us a high-five and told us to dress, quickly, for the curtain call. Various other cast members wandered down the stairs, congratulating and thanking us as they passed by on their way to their own piles of limp clothing.

So what does all this have to do with training for the Gay Games?

Two things. First, it’s never easy to get up on the starting block at a swimming competition. It is difficult to explain how deeply damaging it is to grow up as a sissy in a world in which boys are expected to act like guys and are bullied mercilessly when they fail at it, continuously. For me, climbing up on the starting block at a meet, in a Speedo, is equivalent to standing on a soapbox, nude, and announcing: Yes, I’m a sissy, but my body is strong enough perform this feat of athletic prowess; I may not have the physique of some of these 20-year-olds; I may take twice as long to complete the event as they do; but I’m doing it; I’m here and I’m doing it.

So walking out on the cell’s stage, nude, was a form of vaccination. It will make standing up on the starting block in Cologne a tiny bit easier. And getting up on the starting block will be more difficult by far than swimming the 200 fly. Swimming the fly just takes good form and endurance.

The second thing is the connection to The Living Theater. Almost exactly 40 years ago, as a freshman at the University of Chicago, I went to see a performance of The Living Theater’s “Paradise Now.” I don’t remember much of the show, only that it ended in a writhing group grope that included both cast members and any audience members who cared to participate. I don’t remember whether the cast at that point was clothed or not. At any rate, dozens of students swarmed up onto the stage. This was March 1969, nestled somewhere within that long, pregnant year that stretched between the Summer of Love and the Stonewall rebellion.

I was one of the dozens. So was my friend Michael. We kept our clothes on, but we ended up near each other on the stage, touching each other’s fingers at first, then holding hands, then hugging, and finally, once the show ended, going home to his apartment, and touching, kissing, stroking, massaging, purring, holding on to one another, breathing in each other’s scent, for hours. I was 18. It was the first time I had made love to another man.

Michael, by the way, died young, 33 years ago. He was 27. Not AIDS. He was spared that nightmare, not living long enough either to die from the disease or to survive and watch his friends disappear back into the earth, one bitter funeral at a time. Michael was run over by a car, riding home from work on his bicycle. Seeing his face or hearing his voice used to brighten my day. His death left a hole inside me that has never been filled. I suspect it never will be. I'm always glad to have an excuse to think about him, even though it usually means I end up crying.

Back downstairs at the cell, after the curtain call, I noticed that Kesh was wearing a Living Theater t-shirt. (Previously I had only seen him nude.) I told him the story of my experience 40 years earlier. “It all connects,” he said, smiling. We got so wrapped up in our conversation we missed the second curtain call. Sorry, Kesh.

So walking out onto the cell’s stage nude was also a way to mark one of my first important steps toward coming out, to honor a memory, to sing the body electric. And that has everything in the world to do with getting ready for the Gay Games.

Asser Levy Numerology

The Asser Levy Rec Center, at E 23^rd 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 1^st 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 23^rd 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 1^st 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 2^nd or 3^rd 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.