Not sure why I haven’t been blogging much in the recent past. Maybe I am getting my creative fix with my pottery pursuit and neglecting writing-idk🤷🏼♂️. What I do know is that I started this blog roughly 12 years ago and we aren’t stopping at his point.
I started this blog when I turned 50. So if you take 50 and add 12 as referenced above…well that is 62. Yup I’m 62! I don’t feel it (most of the time). Every year I try to swim my age on or around my birthday. I think I do it most every year however this year was particularly memorable and fun!
This year my swimming buddies weren’t able to do it on my actual birthday, a Monday, as it takes too long to swim my age on a work week day. So we planned the swim for a Saturday morning when we had all sorts of free time. Andria & Andrea festively came with a baloon and tagged our lane. It was going to be just 5 of us however the regular Saturday morning crowd was there and we were able to drag another 5 swimmers to join us, for a bit.
The workout was organized in a way that we would do a 1000m warm up and then each person would design a set of 1000m. We had some drills, shorter swims, longer swims and yes Stacey even got us to do some stroke. That was for a total of 6000m and then it was an easy 100 free, a fast 100 free (kinda-ish) and then an extra 100 IM for good luck-6300m! Afterwards we celebrated with brunch.
I suspect I have done this type of thing before however this time it felt really special, festive and fun. Well…as fun as swimming 6300m can be. I think we all like to suffer a little bit. I feel have always found a special community of swimmers everywhere we have lived. This group in Bend just feels extra special, fun and supportive. Reflecting back on 62 years I am very fortunate in many, many ways and certainly I am fortunate with my “chosen swim family” in Bend. Thank you all for making the Juniper Park Pool such a fun and welcoming spot to go.
I don’t have many issues with aging however I somewhat fear my swimming friends aren’t so happy with how old I am and how far they have to swim to celebrate my birthday. I hope I don’t lose swim friends over my ever increasing age.
Happily, I am at the top of the age range and the rest of the birthday swims this year will be much, much less shorter. I like having young friends😂.
Goggle Reflections 