Of all the sports, it is open-water swimming that creates the optimal relationship to Nature. One the one hand, you feel triumphant gliding through the water and conquering this foreign element. On the other, the waves are relentless, and ultimately win. Always.
Rising Moon, Setting Sun
And I crawled, and I crawled through the waves tonight;
Rising Moon on my left, setting Sun on my right.
As it should be.
Despite appearances, I'm not trying to write pretentious mystical poetry. These lines have been in my head during the last two swim workouts at the lake almost like a mantra. Of course, they were literally what I saw during front crawl: it's that time of the year in the greater Pacific Northwest when you encounter both the Sun and the Moon simultaneously starting from the early-to-mid afternoon when there is no cloud cover. And if you're lucky enough to have sufficient time to observe, you'll see one "rise," as the other "sets."
This is just a mobile shot.
My favorite part has been doing back stroke into the Deep and the Cold, because the comforting Moon--rather than the blinding Sun--was in my line of vision.
And now that I've given myself the luxury of blogging about this, I will likely stay up working till 2 am. But that's okay, I'm a night owl!
This image is from July 15. Not bad for a 7:50-pm Moon in a clear blue sky, huh?
I Swim, Therefore I Am
It was bound to happen.
Tonight, I went to the nearby lake in order to get some action shots of water dogs doing what they've been bred to do best--retrieve--and ended up swimming myself instead.
It was at that moment that I realized: whenever I head to one of the local lakes in the winter, I return with a handful of decent photographs, like this one:
Yet the majority of my images from the summer or early fall are mobile snapshots such as the ones below.
It is simple, really. Growing up in Moscow, I was trained to swim for a number of years, and I really loved it. (In fact, back then, coaches visited elementary schools and picked me for various other athletic disciplines--from figure skating to tennis. Even gymnastics was on the list, though I was "dumped" soon afterward, when they realized I was going to grow into somewhat of a Gulliver among the petite, four-foot-nine girls.)
Later on, like most people trapped by The City, the choice to swim comprised either the overly chlorinated, sneeze-inducing swimming pool or some remote lake in the summer, accessible only on weekends.
Then I moved across the entire continent to "Twin Peaks" and discovered that one of the cleanest glacial lakes in North America was just a walk away! I might sound a bit like an eco hippy by saying that I'm "of the water," but worry not: I imagine myself as a giant mosasaurus when I swim, not some dolphin or worse yet, a wimpy mermaid!
As a result, everyone around gets to be annoyed by this overly giddy post-swim mosasaurus, hear it...err...me brag incessantly about each of my workouts comprising a distance of 2.5-3.5 km (2 miles) primarily in front crawl (see, I did it again!), and, most important, miss out on aesthetically pleasing water photography in the summer.
But I think we can all live with that. After all, the alternative is much worse: transforming into a full-fledged "swim bum," spending all day at the lake, and developing a bad case of giant shoulders.