Nobody will even notice!

“Nobody will even notice!”…someone said to me when I told them I was going to have to learn how to swim at a local pool in my new Orca wetsuit. I’ll blend right in…..

Yesterday was Sunday. It also happened that I got up fairly early even though the kids were spending the night elsewhere. Here’s how the conversation in my head went:

I need to go to the pool today. Even if I don’t use the wetsuit.
But if I go, I should just bite the bullet and do it.
If I’m not going to use the wetsuit, why did I just buy it? What’s wrong with me? Why am I even hesitating? I was so excited for it to arrive.
It’s just a wetsuit. Yes, I’ll look weird but so what. You’re never going to figure it out if you don’t do it. WTF!?

About an hour goes by.

I literally talked myself into going to the pool and at least taking the wetsuit in the car. If I get there and decide it’s too overwhelming I will just swim without it and do it another day.

So I get myself together, take the wetsuit (yet to be named) in the car, and drive a few miles to the pool. It smells. It’s making me nervous. I’m actually tearing up driving down the road. By the time I pull into the parking lot I have real tears.

This is just a wetsuit! Get it together! So I sit there for a minute deciding – do I take it in or not?

I do. I take it in. So much anxiety over this stupid thing. I take it inside and luckily there was a young girl at the front who helped me zip it up and squeeze myself into it. As luck would have it, there was an adult male swim team of about 15 guys practicing. Sigh… really? Right now? But I’m here and it would be really stupid to not move forward. So I get in anyway.

I ended up swimming 45 minutes, starting with the breast stroke – which was actually much harder than the freestyle. Usually it’s the other way around for me. Irony I suppose, or something. I had to stop at the end of each lane & breathe a bit more ‘cuz this thing is super tight. (Every woman wants big boobs until you have them; it makes clothing and especially wetsuits extremely tight.) But after some time I got the hang of it. And it was pretty easy to get out of. I would have thought it would be harder wet, but it wasn’t.

But when I got back in the car afterwards in the parking lot, I cried the ugly cry. The cathartic, overwhelming, thought-i-couldn’t-do-it-but-i-just-did cry. The red, puffy face, i-think-i’m-crazy cry. If you read my previous post, you may understand why. This first swim was a really big deal for me. And considering my starting point of not even being able to swim one lap without stopping, this is a significant step.

I sent a few pics to friends, got some virtual hi-fives, and here I am! Pic below taken after getting suited up & leaving the locker room. I’m excited to go back & keep learning how to do it better – and then eventually make it to Falls Lake when it warms up!