I am in my third week of swimming twice a week, and I am scheduled to go today, but I’m not going. I spent several hours interpreting at work and I’m tired. Oddly enough it’s not the swimming I don’t want to do - if I could teleport to the pool deck and magically be in my swimsuit, and then teleport home and magically be dry, I would swim the laps. But I’m tired and I don’t feel like dragging myself to the pool.

I’m still planning to exercise, though. We have an elliptical trainer and an exercise bike at home, and I’m going to use one of them. I’m hoping that if I force myself to use the home equipment on days when I don’t feel like going to the pool, I will feel better and not get angry with myself for wimping out of exercise altogether.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I’m starting a swimming class! This actually began when I found a very pretty swimsuit, and I wanted an excuse to buy it and wear it. I looked into water aerobics classes at my local recreation center, but they were over $200 so I figured I would just do my own laps to get some exercise. I really do need to exercise, but I don’t like using the elliptical machine or the exercise bike we already have, because both are hard on my knees. (I have symptoms of arthritis in most of my joints, but my knees are especially bad.) So I figured that swimming would be a very good no-impact workout.

My wife convinced me that $80 was too much to pay for a swimsuit, and the swimsuit I ended up getting was just $15! I got this style, but the accent color is magenta rather than orange. Then I was checking out the website for my local rec center, and I thought I’d look again at the class offerings. It turned out they have a four-week “Lap Swimming” class for $75, so I signed up for that immediately. They will teach us how to create a proper workout, how to use the pace clock, and probably things like turns and etiquette too. The first class is tonight and I am really looking forward to it - even if we don’t do a whole lot of swimming, it will be a good start.