Heads Up

On Saturday I'm swimming a mile as part of a triathalon relay.  I do the swim, another person does the biking and a third person does the running.  Pretty cool, right?  Ironically I have far more experience running and biking but I'd like to be a better swimmer so I signed up in hopes that it might motivate me a little.  If nothing else, maybe it would help with my efforts to lose weight. Of course I didn't really think through the fact that I'd be swimming in a lake...cuz I have some issues.  You see, when I was eight, I had a traumatic water experience.  In fact, you might say it was an extreme traumatic water experience, not to mention extremely traumatic.  I once blogged a very detailed post about it  but it was more about recording details than providing entertainment so I don't blame you if you never read it.  I'll give you a quick run down now.

I was eight, my Dad was teaching my brother and I to swim in a river, in Central Africa...and he encountered a hippo...right there in the river with my brother and I.  Now it's hard to garner a lot of sympathy from your family for having witnessed a hippo attack when another member of your family was the one attacked.  Because of course they're all going to think it was more traumatic for the person who was attacked.  And they're probably right.  But still, it was VERY traumatic for an eight year old girl to watch her father collapsing on the shore in a bloody mess and wondering whether or not he was going to live (because lots of people were voicing their opinions that he would not). And for the record, the rest of the week continued to be traumatic for that eight year old girl.  I won't get into all that now - suffice to say, I have some water issues.

Oh...and let me tell you one more thing.  When I was about fourteen years old, my parents took us on vacation to Bujumbura, Burundi. One day they took all of us kids to Lake Tanganyika for a swimming outing.  Some parts of Tanganyika are not open for swimming because of crocodiles but they drove around until they found a spot with no signs telling you not to swim.  I'm not sure why the crocodiles haven't figured out that the eatin's good if they just come around the bend but who am I to question the waters that my parents deem safe.  (Though, now that I think about it, from now on I *may* start questioning.) 

Okay, okay, I do think it was a public beach so don't go retroactively calling child services on them.  At any rate, my brothers and I ventured into the water with great delight.  Danny and I were enjoying the surf when one of us happened to look back and notice that my parents were behaving quite erratically on the shore...and Ted and Jonny were no longer in the water.  Mom and Dad were jumping around and shouting something.  We couldn't hear what they were saying above the roar of the waves so we went in to see what was going on and guess what?!  About twenty feet from us there was a hippo.  Yep.  We hadn't been able to see it over the waves when we were in the water, but they could see it from the shore.  And as you can imagine, my entire family is a little jumpy about hippos.  (That's apparently where my parents now draw the line.  I mean, crocodiles around the bend, that's one thing but hippos in the surf, nope that's it, you're coming back in.)

I joke but I probably ought to thank my parents for their approach because I did overcome my fears enough to continue to swim.  I still get out there and do it.  I don't like deep, dark water - particularly the dark part - but I'll endure it as long as I'm not alone.  And I'll be the first to admit that I have a few funny quirks.  It terrifies me when I try to touch and can't.  When I'm with a group of people, once we've gone out over our heads, I'll never try to touch again until someone else in the group verifies that they can touch.  If somehow I end up alone in the water, I will seriously swim until my knees drag in the sand because it terrifies me *that* much.  And this is probably something I shouldn't admit but I'm always scoping out the other swimmers around me and determining whether or not I could beat them in a mad dash back to shore...away from the shark.  Now, I'd like to think that if a shark really did attack my companion, I wouldn't wimp out and that I would actually try to help them.  But don't hold your breath...just sayin'.

So...anyway...like I said, I'm swimming a mile on Saturday in deep, dark water. If I think about it too much my heart starts to race.  For a while I was working really hard towards the goal of swimming a proper crawl with my head under the water but I've since given up on that.  Now I just want to finish the race. I'll still wear my goggles and maybe I'll surprise myself but pretty much I've also just accepted the fact that I may very well swim a mile with my head out of the water the entire time.  Or maybe I'll just swim with my head under the water for long enough to get away from the spectators.  I mean, I do have my pride.