This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Gay. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
“One of 66.”
That’s how it starts in my head every Monday, at one end of a basement swimming pool in the West Village. Sixty-six lengths of that 25-yard pool equate to the water segment of an Olympic-distance triathlon. It requires half an hour. I do it on a weekly basis not so much to shave down my time—I’ll be happy, at least next time, just to finish—but to build the muscle memory in my body and, most importantly, to scan my psyche. How at peace am I with this work today? How much does it feel like a privilege to do it? Is there surprising strength in me, or unexpected breathlessness? How much and when am I suffering? Where do my thoughts go if they’re not about the freestyle stroke, the recovery, the rhythm of the kicking, the connection of the kicking to the core, the continuous rotation at the waist, the self-urging to stretch the body always longer? If it’s hard and I’m resisting it, do I remember why I’m here?
The rhythm taking me through it all, this swim beside a wall over which one could easily escape and few solid simple targets for a restless mind, is a system of counting. The second length is two of 66. The sixth is six. But counting all the way up to 66 can leave you in what I heard a Peloton teacher describe recently as “no man’s land”—the soft middle between the spry beginning and the last adrenaline build, when all you have to keep you going is your own thoughts. And your thoughts may be, like mine, less moved by the difference between 32 and 33, say, than seven and eight. So instead of the progress ticking up, the goal ticks down.
Counting like this is a trick, and part of the reason it works is that athletics is such a quantitative discipline anyway: reps, sets, weight, lengths, laps, pace, time, rank, watts, pulse. We’re already in the numbers. In cycling class, where I am a competitor, my consciousness is focused on the number one: That’s the place I am driven to attain on the leaderboard. But how to get there is by way of a series of sixties—the seconds in a minute of difficulty you’re going to outlast, which will then repeat.
Back to the pool: “One of 50.” Ten lengths later: “One of 40.” This pattern is reassuring. Each round, you get a decent fraction of the way to your remaining goal that much sooner. What you’ve swam already is behind you, it’s in the bag. All that matters is what’s still ahead, which is shrinking. Finally, “10 of 10,” you touch the wall, you’re done. Look at the watch, how’d we do? The question is not so much the time it took but how it felt to pass through it. How accurately did I perceive the results of my effort? How much did I have to work on my temperament to keep going?
Athletic progress is not, despite what you may have heard, just in the numbers. If your running pace improves, that improvement rests on repetition and conditioning and other sorts of preparation. But the number is just a container in which is either the presence or absence of ease. By ease, I don’t mean lack of effort. I mean that your feeling of resistance isn’t there.
Every so often, your organism is ready and you find yourself in your highest register of performance almost without a feeling of strain. This will show up in some form as a number, and one you might cherish. But nothing about it is as sweet as the feeling you have when you’re in it—the burst of your energy at its highest, in a body at peace. This is not necessarily a frequent sensation, and it’s one I haven’t felt in what has been a wearier season for my body—a time when I’ve had to find some ease in being tired. But the height will come again. I call that feeling exaltation.
Coming Tuesday: Invention.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.
I found my way here via your piano story. I am in my mid-50s and have been learning to swim for about a year. It is the most difficult thing I have ever tried. At least the most difficult thing I have ever tried more than a hundred times. 127, to be exact. I count visits, not laps. I can now pass the swim test required to graduate from Columbia, but I am still a long way from the one at Camp St. Andrews in 1977.