The alternate title for this update was 'Swimfan.' I opted to go with this poster because it looks better than Bill Murray in a Speedo.
The other day I picked up my friend Patrick at LAX. He tossed his bag in the backseat, hopped in next to me, and once we’d dispensed with the pleasantries he asked me what I’d been up to recently.
“Well,” I said, at a loss for anything really interesting to say. “I’ve been swimming. That’s new, I guess.”
“What, like, you’ve got a friend with a pool and you went and hung out there?”
“No. I’ve been going to the Culver City Municipal Pool and swimming laps. I’m trying to get into better shape, and swimming is the one kind of exercise I think I can sort of enjoy.”
“Interesting.” Patrick said. “I always had you pegged as a power lifter and a martial artist.”
“Yeah, well, I had to branch out. It’s been really awkward around the dojo ever since I killed my sensei in that mountaintop duel.”
Why did I choose swimming as my form of exercise? Well, there are a number of reasons.
1) Don Draper did it in season 4 of Mad Men. That alone accounts for about 70% of my motivation.
2) Swimming exercises everything at once, which is great for me, because I hate making those dumb little charts of how many reps I have to do and remembering on which day I work which muscle groups. The more thought I have to apply to an exercise regimen, the less likely I am to do it. With swimming, you just have to show up and do it until you’re tired.
3) You don’t get all sweaty and gross when you swim – and I’m aware that the term ‘sweaty and gross’ makes me sound like a ten year old girl, but when it comes to exercise, I kind of am a ten year old girl. I don’t like being sweaty and musky because hygiene is important to me, hence why I opted to submerge myself in a public swimming pool full of God knows how much pee.
4) I apparently look like an idiot when I try to engage in any other form of physical activity. “Truman, it’s hilarious when you try to do a push-up.” “Oh my God, Truman, go back and run for us again, you look so funny.” “We were just laughing because you have a really weird way of walking.” Maybe, just maybe, swimming is the form of exercise where everyone sees me doing it and goes, “Saaaaaayyy…”
The precedent for #4 is encouraging: Michael Phelps was just some spaz with ADD until his Mom made him join a swim team to try and focus his energy, and it turned out he was not only a natural but the best there ever was because the funky shape of his body made him perfect for swimming. I mean, imagine if she’d had him join the marching band. Then he just would’ve been a sub-par, goofy looking trombone player, as if we need more of those.
My first trip to the pool was pretty nerve wracking, and I had to sit in the car listening to rap music to psych myself up for a good fifteen minutes before walking in.*
*Since you ask, I was listening to the only rap song on my iPhone: Get Back, by Ludacris. It’s an almost comically angry song, yet I empathize with it because Luda apparently hates being touched almost as much as I do.
My fear wasn’t drowning – believe it or not, I actually took a couple years’ worth of swimming lessons as a kid and am fully capable of handling myself in the water – but rather that I would encounter the Helpful Dude at the pool.
My longstanding, crippling fear of the Helpful Dude is the reason I don’t go to the gym – he’s the relentlessly good looking and friendly guy who sees you struggling with a six pound weight and comes over, all smiles, to give you some tips. Hi there. What’s your name? Hi Truman, my name’s Ty. Looks like you’re having some trouble there. Ha ha ha! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?
I’m sure that Ty (whose girlfriend is one of the Clipper Dancers) really thinks he’s doing me a favor, but what I’m hearing is, Hey there Truman, my name’s Ty. Me and all the other Beautiful People were laughing at you earlier, but I started to feel a little bad about it, so I came over here to feel good about myself, because the only socially acceptable thing you can do is thank me profusely and take my advice.
And I don't want that. It makes me feel like I've been making an ass of myself without knowing it, and now with the knowledge that I've been making an ass of myself, I'm incredibly self conscious and want to just burn the gym to the ground so that nobody finds out. Honestly, given a choice between being attacked by Helpful Guy or just being a fat disgusting fuck, I'd probably rather take the latter, because nobody's ever tried to give me pointers on how to eat potato chips.
Once I was sufficiently psyched up I made my way through the locker room, past the squad of elderly naked exhibitionists who seem to live in every pool locker room on Earth, changed into my swimming apparel, and went out to the pool to get started.
As it turns out, the reason that swimming is such good exercise is because it’s hard as fuck. Water has twelve times the resistance of air, which means that swimming fifty meters across the pool is like walking 600 meters,* only you can’t breathe without pulling your head out of the water, gasping, and inadvertently swallowing some chlorine-pee cocktail, which in turn makes you flail around and doggie-paddle in the middle of the pool for a little while before you can get back into your rhythm.
*There is literally no way that can be right.
After a few trips to the pool, I’d gotten to the point where I could swim five full laps before I was exhausted and had to climb out. Don’t bother doing the math – my ceiling was half a mile. That was the most that I could swim.
The problem with swimming half a mile is that it’s only really impressive if you’re injured and trying to escape some mortal peril while you’re doing it.
After the Germans torpedoed his carrier, he swam half a mile back to shore with a chunk of shrapnel in his back while simultaneously dragging a developmentally disabled orphan! He’s a hero!
After he made a New Year’s resolution to get into shape, he swam half a mile at the Culver City Municipal Pool, and then rewarded himself with In-N-Out afterwards. He’s a hero!
See? Not as good. It’s a decent start, sure, but it’s nowhere near as impressive as the guys at the pool who are three times my age swimming three times as many laps in one third of the time. I resolved that I was just going to have to work my way up.
Today I went to the pool determined to swim six laps. With dogged perseverance, I went back and forth across the pool five times. As I sat on the pool steps catching my breath and psyching myself up for my record breaking sixth lap, though, I saw an impossibly handsome lifeguard walking up to me, smiling.
“Hi there,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Hey Truman. My name’s Tony. Looks like you’ve been having some trouble - mind if I give you some pointers?”
The classicest of Truman Capps moments.
Through our conversation, it came out that he and the other lifeguards had some ‘concerns’ about me – namely, that I was going to drown in the middle of the pool. From a swimming standpoint that’s bad, but I was able to convince a bunch of trained lifeguards that I’d never taken swimming lessons or even been in the water before, which, from an acting standpoint, is probably pretty good, right?
I did the only socially acceptable thing and thanked Tony for his advice and concerns, then got out of the pool and went inside to shower, leaving my five lap record intact. I’m all about setting and achieving goals, but one of my big goals in life is to not be the major source of concern in an environment where I’m the only one under 60 without a heart condition.
What I’m coming to accept is that I’m really only in my element when I’m sitting down with Internet access and a Philly Cheesesteak is somewhere within reach. I really love writing and I would go so far as to call it a skill that I have; the problem is that writing on a regular basis doesn’t do the same things for your longevity and overall fuckability that swimming does.
The decision I have to make now is whether I design a workout routine I can do entirely in the privacy of my room, far away from Helpful Dude’s prying eyes, or if I just keep going to the pool and wait for the day Tony submits his screenplay to a production company I wind up working for.
Hi there, what’s your name? Hi Tony, my name’s Truman. Looks like you’re having some trouble with your second act. Ha ha ha! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?
Truman Capps would much rather lifeguards just leave him the hell alone until his head has gone under the surface for the third time.
5 comments:
p90x bro
Re reason 2: Yes. An exercise regimen that requires thought is impossible to execute. Counting is borrr-iiing. It's not really thought but it requires just enough attention to prevent any actual thought while doing it. I tried that kind of exercise, too. After counting to about 15, my mind would wander to something interesting, and the count would be lost. A timer might have been the solution. Bing! End of session.
So it is good do something generally strenuous with a natural end point. I never thought of exhaustion as the end point, but obviously it works. The exhaustion alarm will break into the thought stream pretty reliably. Also, the end of the pool is a natural internal end point: easy to monitor accomplishment by counting changes of direction. No charts; just one number to remember: 5 laps.
I suppose I would not do much wool-gathering when swimming.
I was confused by your statement that 5 laps amounts to half a mile because I imagined a 25-yard indoor pool like the local municipal pool (silly me) rather than the Olympic size outdoor Culver City Municipal Pool. Five "long course" (presumably 2 lengths each) laps of that pool amount to half a kilometer (about .31 mile).
This is a pretty good distance after "a few trips to the pool" for someone who has not swum since taking "a couple years’ worth of swimming lessons as a kid". I do not see any reason for you to be embarrassed by this short-term record: you are a beginner, after all. Keep it up. You'll steadily get better and swim farther and faster.
Possibly your form needs some work. Well, you are a beginner at that, too.
Hey Truman. My name’s Teflonicius. Looks like you’ve been having some trouble fending off the Helpful Dude - mind if I give you some pointers?
Helpful Dude is everywhere (although sometimes it is his sister). You cannot escape by hiding on the internet: even there he posts advice in the comments to your blog.
"It makes me feel like I've been making an ass of myself without knowing it, and now with the knowledge that I've been making an ass of myself, I'm incredibly self conscious and want ..."
You're not giving us enough information. What did Helpful Dude tell you? Was it good advice or beyond your skill level or complete nonsense? Were you actually making an ass of yourself (i.e., being truly stupid, oblivious to rules, or a danger to self and others) or just being the standard inept beginner? I don't know.
But to me, the disturbing part is that I don't hear you applying any judgment to this or putting it in any kind of context or running Helpful Dude's comments past a friend you trust who knows the subject matter. Helpful Dude says something critical and all you can think of is to banish yourself.
Time for a Reality Check. You have described two situations: the gym last year, in which you only imagined an encounter with Helpful Dude (because you never actually went to the gym), and the pool. In both locales you recognize that you actually are a greenhorn and that all the regulars can see that you are a greenhorn. But note: nobody approached you until "after a few trips to the pool". If you had been doing anything egregious, someone would have called you on it sooner; and every time you did it. In contrast, in all the times you went to the pool, only one person had the presumption to come to you and foist uninvited advice on a stranger.
I doubt that Helpful Tony was a delegate sent by the community; more likely he acted on his own initiative. Maybe he is a Clueless Guy sincerely trying to be helpful. Maybe he is the kind of arrogant buttinsky you fantasized in the post. Either way, evaluate what he said. If there is anything useful there, use it; throw out everything else.
To handle Helpful Dude you need a clear understanding that, even in a public facility, you have a right to learn new skills at your own pace, according to your own goals, desires, and ability. I was going to suggest techniques for keeping him in check. But I have realized that you are not ready for that yet.
About eating potato chips: Put the whole chip in your mouth at once. Don't try to eat a chip in parts or to eat just part of a chip. No matter how you divide the chip, whether by biting it or snapping it in two with your hands (or, just to be thorough, with a fork and knife), it will explode into a dozen pieces with a bell curve distribution of sizes that fly in all directions but mostly land on the front and in the pockets of your shirt.
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