Not Just Ninjas

I finally roused myself from my winter stupor to go check out the gym across the river. Dousing myself in water is just about the least appealing thing I can think of in this snowy winter weather, but desperation for exercise drove me to try it at least once.

I went to the local gym, where the protocol works a little something like this: After removing your shoes at the front entrance, you purchase a ticket for your exercise option of choice from a vending machine by the front door: 300 yen to swim or gain access to the exercise room. You must also buy a swimming cap if you are clueless like me and fail to bring your own. Showering before entering the pool is mandatory. If you’re me, you forget your pool ticket or your goggles or your swimming cap or some combination thereof in the locker room; if you are a normal human being whose short term memory lasts longer than 2 microseconds, you proceed with these things to the pool, where you hand over your ticket (possibly wet from the shower) to an attendant.

If you are lucky, will you find that the pool is filled to capacity with 15 year old boys from every one of your English classes, all happy to yell out “sensei!” and stare in horror and fascination while you feebly attempt to swim. Share with me now the joy of living in a small town.

I’m not really sure about the etiquette of swimming, so I ask around: are there fast and slow lanes, do I swim counter clockwise? What’s the deal? I don’t really get any info out of these inquiries, so I just jump into an empty lane. After my first (painfully slow) length, I surface to find a freaked out Japanese lady waving her arms at me “dame dame dame!” I’m in the wrong lane, which has been reserved for high school practice. Sigh.

My second trip to the pool, I’m feeling good, I know the drill, I remember my ticket, my goggles, I figure out the “dame” lanes. I know which direction to swim. I see the baseball team doing drills in the water again (Hello, boys….). When I am five minutes from the end of my swim, the baseball coach from my high school waves me to the edge of the pool. I’m thinking, dear god, what have I done now (“no backstrokes allowed!!!”), and he has me follow him clandestinely over to the side of the pool area, where he asks me how to say “tattoos are forbidden in the pool area” in English. What? Now? Why? So I oblige and go about my business.

I was relieved to find that swimming isn’t a cold activity, at least not in Noshiro. The gym and the showers and the pool are pleasantly heated, so that by the time you’re done exercising, you’re actually hot. I can’t think of a better way to warm up during the winter than to go swimming.

The other great surprise is that swimming isn’t boring. I have no idea why; it totally should be. No book, no ipod, no strategy. Instead, parts of my brain kind of turn off when I exercise, the busy analytic, introspective parts that almost never stop. Combine that with the hypnotic breathing and pretty colors, punctuate it with the occasional challenging social interaction. I just might come back for more.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Ambiance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.