Muthoni Mutonyi

Somewhere around lap 47

It is somewhere around lap 47 that I begin to make promises to God.

Nothing dramatic. Small, reasonable promises. I will be kinder in traffic. I will stop pretending I did not see that WhatsApp message. I will never again sign up for anything at a staff meeting while under the influence of free samosas.

My arms have stopped being arms. They are now two lengths of wet rope that somebody attached to my shoulders as a joke. My legs are following along out of habit. The lifeguard has looked at me twice with an expression I can only describe as professional concern.

And yet I turn at the wall and go again. Because two weeks from today I am swimming for my workplace at the corporate games, and the pool, unlike me, did not sign up for this without checking its diary.

Rewind

Let me explain how a self-respecting introvert ends up in a swimsuit in front of her colleagues.

Someone said the words “we need swimmers” and my hand went up. I cannot fully account for this. I think part of me heard “swimmers” and pictured myself gliding through blue water in slow motion, sunlight on my shoulders, a small crowd applauding politely. The part of me that knows I have not swum a full lap since the Obama administration was apparently on a tea break.

That was weeks ago. Since then I have been “meaning to get to practice” in the same way I have been meaning to organise the photos on my phone. Every week the training schedule arrived. Every week I read it with the seriousness of a woman reviewing a contract. Every week something came up: a deadline, a school thing, a dinner, a Tuesday.

So today was day one. Not day one of a plan. Day one of panic, which is a much more effective motivator. I walked onto that pool deck out of shape, out of excuses, and out of time, and I swam for two hours straight because I had two months of guilt to work through and only two weeks to do it in.

A field guide to my strokes

For those keeping score at home, here is where things stand after day one.

Freestyle. Reliable. Like a Toyota. Not fast, not pretty, but it will get you to the wall and it will not embarrass you at a family function.

Backstroke. Perfectly fine, with the added bonus of a ceiling view and the constant fear of hitting my head on the wall. Which I did. Once. It was not the wall’s fault.

Breaststroke. A frog with a mortgage. Slow, steady, deeply middle class. I could do this all day and I very nearly did.

Butterfly. No.

I want to be clear about butterfly. Butterfly is what happens when someone watched a dolphin, then watched a woman flailing in the deep end, and decided both should be one stroke. Both arms fly out of the water at once. The hips wave. The chest drops. Somewhere in there you are also meant to breathe. I can do any two of those things at any one time. Doing all of them together makes me look like I am being rescued from myself.

Diving. Also no.

The theory of a dive is charming. Stand on the block. Bend. Enter the water headfirst. The practice is that my body has spent nearly five decades learning that headfirst is how you end up in casualty, and it is not about to unlearn that because a whistle blew. I stand on the block. I bend. I think about my life. Then I sit down and slide in like a woman entering a bath she does not fully trust.

Two weeks. One stroke to learn, one dive to survive. One body with strong opinions.

The maths of two weeks

Fourteen days sounds like a lot until you do the sums.

Subtract the working days, which is most of them. Subtract the hours a mother spends being a taxi, a chef, a referee and a search party for the one shoe. Subtract the evenings a wife is expected to be present in body and, ideally, in spirit. Subtract sleep, which I have heard is important. Subtract the Sunday I have already promised to other people.

What is left is roughly four training sessions, two early mornings I will resent, and a great deal of prayer.

So I have adjusted my ambitions. I am not training to win. I am training to survive with style. My targets are modest:

• Complete a butterfly lap without the lifeguard standing up.
• Enter the water headfirst once. Just once. I will take it.
• Finish every race in a manner that allows me to attend the Monday meeting without anyone doing the sympathetic head tilt.

Why I am doing it anyway

Here is the confession inside the confession.

I did not put my hand up because I love swimming. I put my hand up because some quiet part of me was tired of being the woman who takes care of everything except herself.

Exercise has spent years at the bottom of my list. Not because I do not value it. Because the list is long and I am one person and there was always something more urgent than my own lungs. The children needed. The work needed. The house needed. My body, being polite, waited its turn. Its turn never came.

Then a team needed a swimmer, and suddenly I found time. Four sessions, two early mornings and a great deal of prayer, remember? It turns out the time was always there. I just needed someone else to be counting on me before I would spend it on myself.

I have decided to find that funny rather than sad, and then to fix it.

So this is not a two week thing. It is the first two weeks of a much longer thing. I intend to keep showing up at that pool, or a road, or a mat, long after the medals have been handed out to other people. Deliberately. On the calendar. With the same seriousness I give to everything else I have decided matters.

I am on the list now. Near the top. In pen.

A note to the me of two Mondays from now

Dear future me,

By the time you read this, the games are over. Either you did the butterfly or you did something in the butterfly lane that will be talked about for years. Either way, you showed up, and I am proud of you in advance.

Please remember lap 47. Remember the wet rope arms and the promises and the lifeguard’s face. Then put on the swimsuit and go back to the pool anyway, because you said this was the start of something and I am holding you to it.

Also, you still owe God a kinder attitude in traffic. He was listening.

Love,
Lap 47 me

P.S. If anyone reading this knows how to make a body go in headfirst, the comments are open. I will accept advice from qualified coaches, unqualified uncles and any child under ten.