100 Laps Yesterday, and Younger Next Year

Given my schedule with my son Danny and the fact that the pool is open only at limited weekday times, my swimming routine is that I try for four days a week and sometimes only manage three days. I add in other exercise -- walking, running, maybe a little tennis with my pal this weekend? -- as I can, and it is working pretty well.

The structure of my workouts is to include one "long" day each week, with two or three other days on which I am trying to follow an old training principle from distance running, which is to add no more than about 10% to the distance of my workouts, week over week. That's been going great and I've gone from 16 laps my first day in the pool May 19 to half a mile (36 laps) on my regular workout days this week.

Yesterday was my long day. I did 100 laps. 80 laps without a rest, then I had to get out of the pool for a pit stop (and to stretch out a slight cramp in my toes), and then the final 20.

2500 yards.

1.42 miles.

I was in the pool for an hour and 20 minutes. If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would ever in my life spend an hour and 20 minutes swimming laps in an indoor pool I would have laughed out loud and said "you don't know me."

But I am enjoying it, thinking and imagining and ruminating as I swim, feeling better conditioned every day, and the endorphins, have I mentioned the endorphins? I went over to my pal's after my workout and sat on the sofa watching the Sox and she looked at my big silly endorphin-laced grin and said something along the lines of "You so goofy."

Yes indeed.

And that's not all.

You may recall that a few days ago I set a little side-goal alongside my usual cumulative goal of losing a pound a week (on which I am on track). Seeing that I had a shot at reaching it, I decided to make an effort to get "into the 240s" weight-wise by July 1.

So today I stepped aboard and weight in at 249.6, thanks in large part to my nice long workout in the pool yesterday.

It may come as no surprise to you that I like getting various kinds of positive feedback for my efforts. It helps to motivate me. Sometimes the feedback comes from others, and sometimes it comes from writing things down, keeping track, and charting my progress. It makes me feel good. I like to feel good, especially if in some small way I have earned it.

Getting into the 240s is good positive feedback, that will help me continue on this path. So is the progress of what I am able to accomplish in my long workouts over the past 4 weeks:

6/5 - 30 laps
6/11 - 36 laps (1/2 mile!)
6/16 - 48 laps (2/3 mile, no rests)
6/23 - 72 laps - 1 mile!
6/30 - 100 laps - 1.42 miles

And so are the endorphins.

And it's no accident that I got a haircut yesterday and I am going to the dentist this afternoon. You don't want to know how long it has been since I went to the dentist. But there's a trend here, and it's not all bad.

Without putting too fine a point on any of this, I'll just reference one of the section headings from a great book that I am reading on my Kindle thanks to my friend and college classmate Len Edgerly, he of the The Kindle Chronicles podcast. The book is entitled Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You're 80 and Beyond, by Chris Crowley and Harry Lodge. (It's also available in paperback). I don't usually cotton to such books, but this one is intelligent, packed with a lot more interesting information than most fitness tomes, and totally on my wavelength.

The section heading that caught my eye?

"Just Say No to Yasir Arafat"

Just so.

(P.S. - My friend Ned asked me to post the recent photograph above showing the gills that are growing on my body. I couldn't get a profile view which would have been clearer).

Related posts:

Getting Younger Every Year - and a Good Weekly Weigh-in

Romance Leads to Regimen Leads to Results

The Leonard Chronicles: Something Higher to Get You Through

As I mentioned we would, we had dinner last night with my sister Deborah. She had been to see Leonard Cohen at the Wang Saturday night while we were doing our Gilbert and Sullivan thing at the Huntington, and the indoor Cohen concert, by her account, was magical.

Cohen's namesake, my friend, Kindle colleague and long-ago classmate Len Edgerly, mentioned in a very lovely comment yesterday that on [my] "birthday [he'll] be listening to our mutual friend Leonard Cohen at the incomparable Red Rocks outdoor theater in the foothills of Denver." I am a wee bit jealous. If Cohen is magical indoors these days, I am sure that outdoors he will be, well, mystical.

And indeed, it was outdoors that I was first introduced -- a few months after I stayed up all night as a 16-year-old reading Beautiful Losers -- to Cohen the musician (I know, it sounds like a Singer story, and may be). I first saw him in two outdoor Judy Collins concerts in the round at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in the mid-60s, as he began to come out of the shadows from being just -- as if he ever was just -- her pianist and frequent composer.

I can't think of a man who inspires me -- yes, this me, the BMGS at 58.997 -- more than Leonard Cohen. The beauty and power of his golden voice is no less wondrous whether he is singing or writing, music or poetry or fiction, whether he is teaching or observing or being silly, whether he is 75 as he is today or 33 as he was when I first heard him sing, whether he is giving a self-deprecating interview on NPR or the CBC or (as I imagine him) chanting with the other monks or thanking Janis for making an exception at the Chelsea Hotel. And yes, did I mention he is freaking 75? He has lived through experience beautiful and terrible, and among his many lessons the best come as simple observations, and the best of these may be those that tell us that we should hope to be so lucky as to live and love another day.

"He has you at any stage in your life.
He has your youthful idealism.
He has you when your relationship is splitting up.
He has you when you can't face the world and you look for something higher to get you through.
He has you at all stages."

--Bono, describing the songwriter Leonard Cohen, from the documentary film I'm Your Man, about which I wrote here 13 months ago:

Last night I watched a terrific film. I'm not usually much for documentary/tribute films about musicians, but I absolutely loved I'm Your Man, which is about, for, and with Leonard Cohen and a pretty amazing cadre of other musicians including Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Bono, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Beth Orton, Nick Cave and others. Cohen's a remarkable man, has been from his days as a novelist and poet in Montreal to a songwriting and singing career that reaches into and illuminates and gives texture to the most needful moments of so many lives to his own rekindling as a Zen monk at the still point of the turning earth, again and again. The film is a tour de force spiritually, musically, and as a filmed inquiry into the heart of human creativity. So I guess I have to give it a thumbs up.

I spend plenty of time here focusing on how I am undertaking this campaign to reclaim my health and live a longer life, and about the nuts and bolts of what works for me. File this post under why it is so important.

And, oh, by the way, 22 laps at the pool this morning and I feel great!