Squeezing It In

So this training thing has fallen into somewhat of a routine. It works. Some days better than others.

I have new found respect for people who are training for major athletic events and train for hours at a time. I can barely squeeze in 45 minutes a day without a problem. And sometimes it kind of is a problem.

Sunday mornings have become a designated swimming morning. I get up at about 5, feed my addiction to Facebook, throw in a load of laundry or two, unload the dishwasher, straighten up whatever disaster catches my eye first, catch up on the TV show I fell asleep in front of the night before on DVR, and then get ready to go swim.

The pool opens at 8am. I try to be there right when they open so I can get my 800 or so yards in and call it a morning.

You see, I try to squeeze this in before church, where at 9:45 on Sunday morning 10 or so pre-adolescent kid/tweens are waiting to be enlightened by my biblical knowledge and incredible wit.

Alright, that’s not what they are waiting for. Sometimes I think they are just waiting for the snack. But in any event I have to leave my house by 9:30 to get there on time, so I am pushing it just a tad if I get to the Y any later than 8:00.

Last weekend I arrived a tiny bit on the late side. Just a few minutes. I shoved all my stuff in a locker and headed to the pool. Unfortunately the door between the locker room and the pool was locked. So I had to walk, in my lovely Speedo, barefoot (eeeww) through the Y to the front desk. I told them the door between the women’s locker room and the pool was locked.

“No it’s not,” was the reply.

“Ummm, I believe it is,” I said.

So they walked me to the pool where the lifeguard informed me that the door I pointed to as locked actually led to the family locker room, not the women's locker room. The women’s locker room door truly was unlocked.

How sad is that that I have never actually been to the Y without kids enough to know that women have their own locker room? I just assumed that the locker room with all the moms and children was the women’s locker room. I will have to remember that for the next time I want to get dressed without screaming, yelling children whose moms are bargaining with them to just get dressed and stop whining already. Not that my kids ever did that. You know, me having perfect children and all.

Moving on.

So I traipsed myself into the pool, found an empty lane and got to the business at hand. I actually had a grand old time. I think I might have even had a “swimmers high”. I think that’s what it was. Either that or I was getting hypoglycemic from not having had breakfast. But it was a great swim. I could have actually kept going except that the clock was beckoning me.

And the thought of being late for church makes me break out in hives. I think it borders on a pathological fear. Growing up, we were always late for church. And we were not the “slink into the back of church when you are late” kind of family. Oh no. We had to find a seat, which after church has already begun is almost always in the FRONT of the church. Where you have to walk by the entire rest of the congregation to find a pew big enough to seat 6 people. By the time we were at our appointed nearly always-the-very-first-row seats, I was sweating profusely, wanting to just disappear.

As you can see, I do not like to be late for church. So I jumped out of the pool and ran to get ready.

We did make it to church on time. Our Sunday school class was fun, and I managed to bang the water out of my right ear half way through the recessional hymn.

For now, that’s how I’m squeezing it all in on Sunday. The rest of the week –- well, I don’t want to bore you all at once. I’ll save that for another day.