jock librarian

Boxers. Climbers. Football Players. Wrestlers. Whatever It Takes: Women on Women's Sport is chock full of passionate essays about personal dreams and aspirations, competition and self-discovery. I was surprised to learn that before she crafted poetry, Maxine Kumin exercised racing dives, straight-armed windmills and dolphin undulations. In "Swimming and Writing," Kumin notes she matched the "rhythm of memorized poems to the stroke-breath-stroke of the trudgen crawl." Upon receiving a copy of A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" around her sixteenth birthday, Kumin recalls:

Without making any conscious effort to do so, [I] had committed to a good portion of the book to memory. I swam to Housman's cadences, his classic romantic elegiac voice suffusing my long-distance swims with gentle melancholy. "With rue my heart was laden," I droned, swiveling my head for the next intake of air. "For golden friends I had," I bubbled, breathing out into the water.

Yesterday, my golden teammates gathered for a classic workout:
12 x 50 IM order stroke/free (descend :05 seconds by groups of 4)
12 x 100
first round: 1, 3 (free) and 2, 4 (100 IM)
second round: 1,3 (free) and 2,4 (stroke)
third round: 1,3 (ez free) and 2,4 (fast free)
Kick IM order
25 kick
50 kick/swim
75 swim/kick/swim
Generously adjusting our lane's intervals, Coach Lisa gave us no reason for rue.