You Bought A Zoo! I Went Swimming!

When I moved to my new neighbourhood in October, my good friend Kate, who lives right near here, made me promise that we would go swimming on a regular basis at the newly-renovated community centre pool which is literally a 2-minute walk from my place (and about 7 minutes from her place). Absolutely, I said!

Well, as you can probably guess, what then ensued was a weeks-long-turned-months-long set of creative excuses, day after day, why one or the other of us couldn't go swimming the next day. As Kate said at one point, we're such hipsters we stopped swimming before we even started. Ha.

But now! We are swimming! Last Friday, we actually made it out. Kate went another time this week as well, and then we went again tonight. And while I don't remember swimming ever being this...EXHAUSTING...it's fun! Tonight after work, I bought swim goggles because I realized last week that I'm slightly panicked about putting my head in the water and not being able to see (I wear contacts so I have to close my eyes).* I'm used to snorkeling and scuba-diving, see, and a key feature of those activities is that YOU CAN SEE. That's kind of the point, actually. My new goggles rock! Though it turns out I am TERRIBLE at swimming. It's a lot of work when you don't have a BCD or flippers! I may look into remedial adult-swim classes later this winter. In the meantime, there's absolutely no shame in swimming with a flutterboard in the slow lane, right?


* Wearing contacts, which I only started doing just over a year ago, is a definite plus. One of the reasons I was always reluctant to go swimming in the past is that I couldn't find my way around. Swimming is no fun when you can't tell the swimmers from the sharks in the pool.**

** When I was a kid, I was convinced that if I took my eyes off the deep end, a shark would swim out of one of the water-exchange grills. This was particularly a danger at the pool at my grandmaman's old condo in Quebec City, which was kind of dark, shadowy and mysterious, at least to a 10-year-old.