the Merry March

Every Tuesday the Tri-Babe group meets to swim in Wild Cat Lake, which is a nice sized lake in Seabeck. So far I've attended two of these open water swims. The photo to the right is Trixie, the Tri-Babe mascot, dressed in her "big girl pants" so that she is ready for the swim.

The first swim was just hilarious. Lisa emailed us ahead of time and told us to be sure to show up because Dave had a surprise for us. It turned out that she was the surprise! She was spending time in Florida taking care of her mother and came back for a few days. So she started off by apologizing to those of us who thought that our surprise was "cute yoga boy". Apparently one of her colleagues at Expansions Yoga volunteered to help with the swim last year. Our theory is that he thought he would get to be around a bunch of buff women in skimpy swim suits when the reality is that most of us are much more practially clad in wet suits. So "cute yoga boy" turned out to be the eye candy since he showed up dressed in not too much more than just rippling muscles. Maybe that kind of perk is why we have so many veteran tri-babes - ha!

When we checked in for the first swim, we were given a piece of lake grass. Since this is Washington, and it's normally really cold, and Puget Sound isn't exactly a place sane people swim, it's perfectly understandable that a lot of the women aren't comfortable swimming anywhere except a pool. So, after finishing with the cute yoga boy story, this was the next issue Lisa addressed, and her speech was just as hilarious. She started by telling us that fortunately (or unfortunately), when she was young, her parents sent her through a Dale Carnegie course and she learned that whenever she was facing something difficult that the best strategy was to anticipate the worst thing that could happen and prepare for it. So the lake grass was for all of us who thought it was yucky - we were supposed to rub it all over our bodies and get used to it. Then she addressed those of us who are afraid of fish nibbling at our toes by reminding us that no self respecting fish is going even be on the same side of the lake as we are once we start splashing in... and that if she could swim in barracuda infested waters in Florida, we could certainly swim with a few tadpoles.

Once we got all that out of the way, we all learned "the Merry March". This is a method for getting into cold water and dealing with the natural shock our body feels. We sing something like "the saints go marching in" to ourselves while marching straight in up to our navels, splash water on our faces, splash water on our backs, exhale, inhale, and on the next exhale, dive in. We all lined up and filed in like a group of lemmings and it worked!


Wildcat Lake, Seabeck, Kitsap County, Washington