Angie and I headed down to the Albany Bulb for 8, but were a little late as usual, so the 8 o’clock swimmers were already in the water and the 7 o’clocks were nearly dressed.

The sun was shining, but there was a bit of a cold wind and getting into the water was hard. Harder still because it felt very cold. At 52 degrees, it was icicle shards up my wrists and down my neck. Then glorious, tingling, goodness. I’ve still got this cold and I was determined to swim it out of me, so I put my head down and front crawled for a long time. We turned around at 13 minutes and swam back because we’re still figuring out what the best length of swimming time is for this water temperature. 25-30 minutes seems right. 

I spent the rest of the day looking over my blog (but forgot to post this) in anticipation of writing a distillation of this year of swimming. In so doing, I was struck by how fearlessly we swam all winter last year, unconcerned about the exact temperature or how long we were in. We just threw ourselves in there and paddled around until we felt like getting out. This year we’ve been more trepidatious. Probably we’re just smarter.