Friday, August 7, 2009

Unadvised endeavors

I am going to start this post stating that I am amazingly and wildly out of shape. Four months of pneumonia and the cascade of asthma plus the ensuing depression makes it really difficult to get motivated to work out.

Two weeks ago, at my daughter's swim meet, they had a "Parent's Relay". The original email stated that each parent would swim 25 yards (one pool length). So I got myself signed up to do the relay. The day of the relay they told us we would be swimming 50 yards. Well, I was not going to back out, what is one more length of the pool, right?

They had us do a warm up lap or two (I chose to do only one lap, to preserve my energy, especially since I had forgotten my inhaler in my other handbag, so did not have that available). I felt pretty good, confident that I would be OK out there. How very wrong I was.

I opted to swim second for my team. That was probably a good thing. So I bellyflopped off the blocks when it was my turn, swam to the end of the pool. No problem, so far, so good. About half way through the second lap, I started gasping for breath. So I tried to slow down and breathe. Then my body just stopped working. I was trying to will my body to do the freestyle stroke and really nothing was happening. So I did the only thing I could think of, I flipped over to my back and started to do the backstroke. I was still very winded, and not moving very well. I started to panic and cry, thinking I was going to die out there in the pool, making a complete ass out of myself in front of my daughter and everyone. I finally made it to the end of the pool, but could not climb out on my own and had to be pulled out. I really should have dropped out of the thing once I found out it was 50 yards. What on earth was I thinking?

I take a bit of pride in the fact that I DID finish my leg. And I did not die out there.

The next day, we had a family kayaking day for the Brownie troop. Matt, K, and I rented two kayaks, one single and one tandem. I put Matt in the tandem with K, because if I got stranded I did not want K stranded with me. I was really nervous about the kayaking, especially since I had really gotten in over my head swimming the day before. But it was a lot easier than I thought (and way easier than canoeing, which I have done before). I almost capsized my kayak a couple of times, and got seriously soaked, but it was really fun. I really want to go again.