I met these fine ladies–I assume they’re sisters, although I can neither sex a duck or determine their genetic similarities through a camera lens–during a rare camera outing. I used to grab my cameras and drive around looking for photographs three or four times a week. Now, due to the intervention of Covid, vision complications and I suppose just flat out age, I’m lucky if I go out four times a month. But I loved these ladies, whom I found gathered together for protection at the end of a fishing site. they are domestic ducks so they either live nearby or they’ve been unusually lucky, but I try not to think too hard about the stupid things humans do to non-humans. I wish these girls well.
I, in the meantime, have returned to the pool.
My gym/pool closed for some time during the pandemic, and when they re-opened they had all the usual warnings and special rules I found cumbersome. I had grown accustomed to my extraordinary good fortune of not having anywhere to go to exercise, and I settled in for some time to a life where I rarely left the house. The truth is, I enjoy being in the pool and I do find some odd sense of satisfaction in walking my laps and doing my exercises. I get pleasantly high from moving. It’s all good except the packing, loading into the car, and making the time. And without it, I had SO MUCH time…
I have also gotten stiff, uncoordinated, my balance is shot and I’ve gained weight. I struggle to get into a car, my knees won’t let me get over curbs gracefully and a flight of steps strikes terror into my heart. It’s the not being able to lift my leg high enough to get into a car that annoys me.
So I bought a new suit and new swim shorts, hunted up a towel and went back.
My gym, in the meantime, has been sold to a different management company. This does not appear to affect my life all that much, but I did need to change the card that lets me (mostly because the old one was falling apart.) They changed the days they clean the pool. The classes have shifted their schedules.
And I can’t walk as many laps, stay as long, or do as many reps of my exercises as I did three years ago. I get stiff. I find myself reserving strengths for the climb back up the steps, out of the pool. I come home now from a greatly reduced workout and crash like a dog.
I have maintained a healthy exercise program in odd, random spurts throughout my life, but rarely have I been so stiff and sore for so little as I am today. So I sit here, basking in the warm glow of self-satisfaction that I went to the gym today, a little high on the endorphins and a a little grouchy about being stiff, and I think, I used to walk a mile in the pool (37 laps) in 45 minutes or less. I walked 10 laps today and I’m about half-sorry.
I also go up the steps a little more gracefully today, so I guess what I used to do three years ago doesn’t matter all that much. It’s still all about what I’ll be able to do tomorrow.
cpeckblog 