In the pool she discovered the Zen of doing laps by moonlight—and some truths about how she hoped to deal with aging.
At night, there are only a few intrepid souls in the pool. I always get my own lane. Deep indigo shadows fall from the skylight. Entering is chilly, shudder-inducing. “If only it weren’t so wet,” a friend of mine says about swimming at night.My mind jumps out of my body. I don’t want to do this. My body takes over, plunges past the first cold shock and strokes for the far end. I touch the rough wall and push off, kick and stroke back. One length, two. The water’s chill softens into silk.
My shoulders churn in rhythm. Underwater lights make the pool a flickering turquoise womb world. I reach out of myself and feel the stretch as my arms eat up the laps. Eighteen laps make half a mile; 36 laps, a mile. I’m trying for the whole mile, but some nights it’s more difficult than others.
Night swimming puts me into a trance. I lose track of which direction I’m facing, lose track of everything but the number that I keep repeating to myself: “Nineteen, nineteen, nineteen, turn, twenty, twenty, twenty.”
This habit is hard on my hair, which is curly and dry. Chlorine turns it into frizzy straw. I keep it cut short and massage conditioner into my scalp before I put the bathing cap on, but it still escapes about halfway through the swim, one unruly lock at a time, soaking up all that bad chemical brew. Some days I look like a dandelion.
In the first months after I started training, everyone I knew had to feel my biceps, even my rabbi. When my arms hung at my sides, I could feel the unfamiliar bulge against my ribs, the meaty apples of new musculature. Then friends started insisting I was getting taller.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “People don’t usually grow in their forties.”
“But you have.” They were stubborn and would not back down.
“All right,” I conceded. “I’m taller.”
The real work, as anyone who’s ever trained for an athletic event knows, is mental. The farthest I had ever swum before was half a mile, when I was in my twenties. Two decades later, I’d still stop at precisely 18 laps, feeling finished. But after two friends were diagnosed with breast cancer, I signed up for a mile swim to raise money for the Women’s Cancer Resource Center. This meant I needed to reach beyond myself. So I started pushing my mental barrier, at first cautiously, a few extra lengths, then a few more than that.
