It is impossible to buy a safety pin these days. I know this because I just tried to buy one. You have to buy at least 50 at once, which means that I have 49 safety pins that I don’t need. Well, maybe I’ll lose the one I’ve got…but still, I can’t see myself doing that more than maybe five times total. So I’ve still got an extra 45.
Why did I need a safety pin? Well, I’ve got a lock that goes on a locker, and it’s got a key. I don’t want to lose the key, so I will instead safety pin the key to articles of my clothing.
Why not just put it in my pocket? Ah, well that’s the thing. The article of clothing that I will be pinning the key to has no pockets. For that article of clothing is…my swimming trunks!
Yup, for my birthday I bought myself swimming trunks. And today, I left work early (note: “early” means “after 8 hours without doing overtime” which seems “early” to me these days) and hit the YMCA for some swimming excitement.
Unfortunately, I forgot my goggles. I blame Bush for this. It meant I couldn’t do any freestyle swimming, or pretty much any swimming that involved my arms. So I did 200 yards of leg work.
Let me tell you, being away from the pool for two years never felt so brutal. I used to swim a mile (well, actually 1800 yards—a mile being 1760 yards, but the pool is 25 yards long, which math geniuses will be able to tell you does not go evenly into 1760!).
[Quick side note. Do you know how weird it is to pick up a carton of yogurt, pull the top, only to go: That's….not what yogurt is supposed to look like? And then you read the side to see you picked up "yogurt mousse" instead of yogurt.
Obviously this just happened to me, hence the side note.]
Anyway, back to the point. I used to swim a mile all the time. I once swam three miles in three days. But that was two years ago.
Today, those 200 yards kicked my rear. When I got out of the pool, showered, dressed, and left the Y, I stepped off the curb onto the street…and suddenly my legs were noodles. I was like, “Whoa, buddy!” Then after the bus ride, the walk up the hill to my house was obviously made steeper by evil gnomes. Because, seriously, I needed two mountain goats and a Sherpa just to get to my driveway. I won’t tell you about the brutal walk up the Dreaded Stairs of Death from the garage to the living room to my bedroom. At least by then my feet had grown comfortably numb (I’ve heard you can get frostbite at those high elevations, even in the summertime).
But now I have a goal. It’s a goal I figure will take me three to five years to complete (and that’s just blogging about it!). My goal is, starting from today (June 23, 2009) and moving forward into the future (Month Day I Die, Year I Die) I want to swim 1,000 miles.
Since I’m using a yard pool… Well, there are 5,280 feet in a mile and 3 feet per yard, which is 1760 yards per mile. That gives me 1,760,000 yards to swim for 1,000 miles. I can subtract the 200 yards I did today. So I’ve got 1,759,800 yards to go.
*w00t*
I so blame Bush.
