I have two major goals that implicate swimming in 2024. Number one is to finish my year-of-swimming memoir, which I spent last year busily working away on. Sometimes I think it’s nearly finished and sometimes I think I should throw it in the garbage. Number two is to make a temperature blanket: Each day I… Read More New Year New Swimming Schemes
Well, Coltober did its work of revitalizing my daily swimming but not daily blogging! I am struck by how difficult it is to blog every day (or ever) and reminded anew that the greater accomplishment of my year of swimming was not the fact that I managed a daily swim, but that I actually wrote… Read More Coldtober Days 2-4
Time is hurtling forward and somehow it’s October again. As I did last year, I’m participating in Coldtober this month. Every October the Irish mental health organization, Helplink, puts on a daily cold water swim challenge called Coldtober to raise money and awareness for mental health. Last year, it was a no-brainer for me to participate–I… Read More Coldtober Day #1
I only sent yesterday’s blog post today because I stalled out on it before finishing. I think it’s getting more difficult to write in these last few days because the conditions have been relentlessly, monotonously, gray. The days are morphing together in all of this gray and, though I am loving my swims as much… Read More Relentless Gray (Day 284)
Angie pointed out that today I have 100 days left of my year of swimming. I’ve got mixed feelings about that. I’m proud, of course; to have stuck with it; to be on the easy slide into finish. But I also detected a hint of disappointment in myself when she pointed it out. Like I… Read More One Hundred Days Left (Day 265)
Back in 2008 when I was still living in Montreal, I joined a writing group in California in anticipation of our move there. I was taking a leave of absence from my job at McGill in order to try my luck at fiction writing and knew if I had any chance of taking myself seriously… Read More Celebrating Kira (Day 232)
I’m out of words for today’s swim. I used them all to catch up on the blog posts I missed while backpacking. Most of them anyway. Here are a few: Silky and warm, the water rippled with energy, but not waves. Squadrons of pelicans flew overhead. The sun shone, clouds fluffed, and the air was… Read More Glad for Another Day in the Bay (Day 160)
Sometimes when I’m swimming in the bay at the Albany Bulb it’s all so familiar I don’t see it at first; I’m just there, doing what I do day in and day out, a body moving through space, changing clothes, plunging into cold water, feeling and not feeling the sensations. Then I remember I have… Read More Paying Attention (Day 77)
My challenge to myself to swim every day in 2022 is also, of course, the even bigger challenge of writing about my daily swims. While I might not write much each day, there are times when churning out these few hundred words feels like pulling unloose teeth from my skull with pliers. I’ve been a… Read More Writing My Swims (Day 65)