Swim Class

In the spring of 2004 I signed up to take a swim class just for the butterfly stoke. It was a PE course for students and faculty at Lingnan University in Hong Kong where I taught English for a year. It was the first swim class I had taken since I was 6 and learned the crawl in the pool in the basement of my parents' building. In high school, I was on the swim team for freshman and sophomore years, and I taught kids to swim in the very pool in which I had learned. In college I became a certified lifeguard and worked at the Williams pool, including a brief stint teaching swimming there to pre-schoolers from Pine Cobble Elementary School (where I ran an after school program). Swimming, it seems, has always been a part of my life. Seeing as my mother was a mermaid, I guess that makes sense.

Today was my first day of swim class at Competition, my gym here in Sao Paulo. It was my first ever swim class in Portuguese. Signing up for the bi-weekly, hour-long classes is the only way to use the pool as there is no such thing as "free swim" except for on weekends when children fill the pool and render it impossible to swim laps anyway. I am trying a new marathon training program this time around which entails running only three times a week, and then cross training for another two. So, on Monday and Friday I go to the gym for an hour of pilates followed by my adult swim class.

Today I had to take a "test" (a.k.a. swim three laps in various styles) after which I was placed in level 2 of 3. As far as I can tell the men and the women are taught separately (by instructors of the same sex). The pool is clean and the roof overhead is retractable so, on a sunny day like today, it's like swimming outdoors. My only issue was the smell that permeated the entire room. I couldn't place it until half way through my work out it hit me mid-lap: pasta sauce. Yes, the pool area is pasta sauce-scented. My teacher, whose name I forget, is very nice. She didn't critique my technique, she simply provided a work out for me to complete; it's kind of like being on the swim team again. Hopefully in the weeks to come the work outs will grow progressively more challenging, and, maybe some day, if I work really hard, I'll make it to level 3. Pasta anyone?