Going to Beach with Melissa Today

 This morning would be the birthday of my late father and son.  Daddy would be turning 100 while Will would be 36.  Melissa and I are planning to stay overnight at a Daytona Beach Hampton Inn and then return home Monday.  After Saturday's double-lap walk through Depot Park, I got up early, around 4:30, and did ten minutes of running in place on the living room rug floor before brewing some coffee and writing this. Earlier yesterday evening I listened some more to a library audiobook about running and the first chapter of an annoying Hardy Boys adventure story...it reminded me of an old South Park episode titled "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce" when the gay lads keep "getting a clue" You know,  Joe and Hardy each sound like their privileged brothers, the only missing words being their "clues"that no one ever holds them accountable for . Later this morning, Melissa and I have a reservatioto at a Daytona Beach hotel, where we hope to enjoy the ambience of our room balcony and the poolside.  It sure would be nice to recover some walking and running fitness on that sandy beach, too.  The beach looks like the perfect location to practice running softly.  

Olympic Swimming Trials and Pool Training Access

I was watching the Olympic qualifying trials the past few days on NBC, primarily in swimming and running.  I couldn't get past the notion that with the former, the great athletes in these events were privileged to have easy access to pools to train in.  When I went to high school, you could tell that the good swimmers also had that kind of access to pools, and I didn't.  Now I'm 67 and with a gym membership touting its pool to swim laps in, and I have pretty much given up on the idea of ever having access to it with it being so crowded, even late in the evening.  Yet on a personal level I have to take responsibility for making time to get to a pool, whether it is waiting for long stretches at that gym or finding a way to use one of my two city pools when they happen to be open.  I'm still entertaining the notion of drastically improving my swimming form in the various standard strokes and integrating it all with my running as I age...but that pool access is still an obstacle, something that does not exist with my running or walking.  Of course, I'm talking training to a much more modest level than those championship swimmers, and they also merit their due respect for working hard and rising above their more limited and privileged group of competitors...

Swimming: My Past, Present and Future

Although I grew up in south Florida just a few miles from the beach and visited it numerous times with my family, I didn't learn how to swim until I was twelve years old, and that was only because my high school, in 1968, just had its own swimming pool built.  Before, in the ocean, I would just get out in the waves in water nearly over my head and float on my inner tube...the fact that I couldn't swim didn't seem to bother anybody!  Yet if I got in a swimming pool, I'd be afraid of the water, go figure!  Even after learning to swim, though, I got no practice in my swimming style...I was taught the rudiments of the American freestyle crawl stroke that one time and that was it.  In physical education class in high school, I was always by far the slowest in swimming...that was pretty humiliating.  It was only when my kids were growing up and taking their own swimming lessons that I became more serious about improving my swimming skills...but still I lagged behind.  I did, at the advanced age of 40, finally learn to float on my back, yet I still haven't figured out treading water.  Back in 2011, seeing a friend doing laps at my nearby YMCA pool using the breaststroke, I decided that year to try to develop it on my own.  I seemed to be making some slow progress, but a serious medical diagnosis later that year sidelined this project, and I didn't resume it...until now, some twelve years later.  What I'd like to do is develop most of the basic swimming skills, including at least the crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, and treading water, to the point where I can go for a sustained period performing pool laps.  I've set aside Friday evenings to get pool time at my local gym, and I do have several instructive YouTube videos to draw upon for guidance. It should be a fun adventure of sorts.  What to do with it all?  Just swim more on my own, I guess. Although swimming is regarded as a generally kinder sport on the body than running, it is more limited regarding public racing events in comparison to the latter because of the constraints of providing suitable water venues.  I've been kind of dismayed by this, since this has made the sport a bit more elitist than is running/walking, which has gained a lot of popularity among folks-at-large and allows more participation at slower levels of ability...