Sometimes, reality is more important than ultrafilters and manifolds.

So, another thing I have been up to lately is swimming. As some of you might remember, I started to actually learn how to swim (I mean, I knew how to not drown by the time I was about six or seven, but I didn't really swim) in my last semester at Mills - it was part of my extremely academic final semester (i.e. Abstract Algebra and Intermediate Programming, but then Model UN, Tango, and Swimming. :D). I had a class where I went swimming twice a week and during which I not only properly learned three of the four strokes but also made the incredible realization that I can swim at different speeds. If you ever have been not a runner and then have decided to go for a run or start running, you know what I'm talking about. You think you only have one speed. For me, that speed was enough for me to end up gasping at the other end of the pool, wondering how the hell I was supposed to do that for the entirety of the fifty minute class. The equivalent of this, of course, is sprinting for the first two minutes of your run and then ending up with a stitch in your side and wondering how the hell anyone could go for runs of twenty or thirty minute length. The answer, of course, is to jog. Or, to do the swimming equivalent of jogging.

I was extremely impressed by my own progress in that swimming class. As someone who runs and works out frequently, it was great to have something that is so low-impact as far as exercise is concerned. But also, swimming is brilliant in how it engages the entirety of your body - arms, legs, core, and it does wonders for your endurance and wind. The only other sport I've ever done that is so equal-opportunity when it comes to the body is rowing, and swimming is even nicer on the body than that. So, I was extremely proud of my progress and it got to the point that (with a few breaks in between) in a class period, I could swim a mile, and was very in tune with how my body moved in the water. It was fun!

Now, zoom forward six months from my last swimming class. I've been in Budapest for a while and have some friends here who invite me to come swimming with them with a 'very low-key team' - this means that on the team, the ages of the swimmers vary from 21 (the youngest ones are the students I'm going with) to the wizened old 60-something Hungarian men who are all wirey muscle and dry humor, with all kinds of sizes and shapes in between. I decided to go with them because, hey, I enjoyed swimming when I did it before and it's a good activity to do with friends.

Let me note: of the three people who I go with, 1. Was on the swim team all through high school and played other sports throughout college. 2. Was on the swim team in high school and plays water polo in college. 3. Was on the swim team all four years in high school and all four years in college.

Remember the amount of experience I have? Yeah. :)

I got my first swim cap from the team yesterday!

So, the fun thing is also that the pool we swim at is large enough but there are a lot of people on the team, so you are frequently smooshed in a lane with other folks. The lanes are organized by speed. Also, of course, my friends are in the second to fastest lane 'cause they're all young and spry and experienced. Now, I could either bump into the rotund Hungarian ladies I don't know in the slow lane way on the other side of the people and have awkward hand-gesture-y encounters, OR I could swim in the lane with my friends who can probably swim an entire length of the pool in the time I get myself organized enough to push properly off the wall. My friends are nice and told me that as long as I understood pool lane etiquette (i.e. let people pass you if they are going faster) that I could stay with them. One lap in the lane goes like this:

Finish: <--------------<

                                ^

Start :  >--------------> 

So that if you look at the lane head-on from the start position, it looks like a road. You drive on the right, people pass on the left.

So, yesterday, the workout involved a lot of IM's (individual medley) - where you swim the strokes in this order: Butterfly - Backstroke - Breaststroke - Freestyle . The distance varies depending on the exercise - sometimes 25m each, sometimes 50, sometimes it varies from stroke to stroke. 

So, first of all, they're all faster than me. Second of all, I can't do Butterfly, but I try to at least do a baby version of whatever they're doing - either giving myself more rest time than they need or doing a little shorter distance, etc. I let each of them take off from the wall (I say "take off" because boy, they really fly!) at the beginning of this exercise last night and I generally do freestyle when they are swimming Butterfly. However, everyone else in the pool is doing the same workout, so everyone else (except for the one or two other people who, for their own reasons, are doing something different -- this is very low-key, as you recall) is swimming Butterfly. Have you watched people swim Butterfly? You know the huge dolphin kicks they do? And the big arm swoops? 

Imagine this: you are swimming up the right side of the lane, very close to the lane marker because you know you will be passed very soon. You are thinking about when to breathe in your stroke and think: 'if I turn my head to the left, I'm going to get a mouthful of water because they're swimming back to the wall on that side of me."And as you turn your head to the right to take a breath, it just so happens that the swimmers in the OTHER lane (which is very close to you, given that you're a handsbreadth from the lane marker) are RIGHT THERE coming back to the wall because you are slow enough that they've been down to the other end and have already turned around and are making their way back. So, you turn to breathe, manage to sneak a breath and not get too much water in your mouth from the splash from their feet, put your face back in the water and watch the stormy seas in front of you, and plan how you will turn around at the wall (given that you can't do flip turns) without causing a collision!

This is very exciting.

I have never swum in such close proximity to other people before, especially people who were so much better than I am. When I would come up for air during breaststroke and see the waves of water around me from people on either side, though my foggy goggles, it looked so very much like the stormy seas that I had to sing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme to myself in my head while I was under the water. I generally recite poetry to myself while I swim, it helps me stay in a rhythm and keep me motivated when I'm tired. Some favorites are old poems I somehow memorized from childrens books, including the Sorting Hat songs from Harry Potter. But just as I was feeling dead last night in the pool, having a hard time pushing myself for the last ten minutes, I remembered that I had memorized the wonderful V-speech from V for Vendetta, and that got me through the last 100m. It was a good time.

But the point is, last night, there were times when I just wanted to make sure that I was going to be able to breathe, and compared with the incredibly theoretical proofs that plague my mind so often, it was nice to have a problem so rooted in reality that I needed to solve for a change.