I’m posting this late because right after my swim, Angie and I had to make Shepard’s pie for a hundred people. It was hard work and there wasn’t a second to sit down until after the dinner, at which point I was drinking wine and celebrating our accomplishment. 

Now, yesterday’s swim seems like a long time ago. The air was thick with pollution (smoke from fires?), making the sky an eerie twilight for much of my swim.

I joined the 8 o’clock gang and we ended up swimming 1.5 miles. It felt a lot easier than the 2-miler the day before. The conditions were pretty much the same–waves that fought me on the way out and pushed me along on the return. I think the main reason it was easier was simply that I wasn’t planning on a long swim and so I wasn’t telling myself it was hard. We just kept going, periodically checking in with each other and deciding to go five more minutes, then fifteen more, until it turned into an unexpectedly long swim. It’s amazing how much the story I tell myself shapes my experience of whatever I’m doing.