I pushed open the door to the swimming pool with a towel.
I ended up at the YMCA as a last resor. Years of chronic neck and back spasms had stolen all the variety and fun I used to find in working out, especially that amped-up endorphin high. By my early 50s, I had spent thousands of dollars trying to mitigate this pain with opsi treatments, after burning through one routine after another: running, kickboxing, spinning, kung fu, weight pelatihan, aerobics, Zumba, walking, children's karate, even opsi terapis such as the Feldenkrais Prosedur. And yet knots clung to my spine like barnacles and flared up after such innocuous activities as doing the dishes or just sitting funny.
Once strong enough to propel me through the air in handsprings, sprint down a trek and dodge oncoming players in rugby, my muscles had begun to atrophy by age 30. A physiotherapist told me then that it is not uncommon for dancers or gymnasts to remain hyperflexible as they age, but the brain thinks something is amiss when there's too much rubbery movement, so it orders everything into lockdown.
It's the brain's way of keeping you safe, even though you perasaan horribly unsafe because you're in a spasm. I haven't been able to do a sit-up for decades, since the year my mother died, one year before I was pregnant. That was 20 years ago.
The maladies of age begin long before white hair and a declining physique greet you across the dividing line of 50. When you reach menopause, you meet your new bodi. Mine was less peppy than before and more unpredictable. It had absorbed the shock of getting divorced and made me a cliche of a woman in her 40s. At 50, migraines pursued me daily. Medication to stave them off shaved 9kg (20lbs) from my thin frame.
I seized up at the tiniest evens. Neuromas - benign growths of nerve tissue - in my feet stung like electric shocks when they got inflamed and made weight-bearing exercise impossible. I traded down kickboxing and spin for the elliptical and the recumbent exercise bike, but I was barely moving on those machines - never broke a sweat, never got stronger, only got more depressed. I gave up the gym, the outdoors. I decided to try swimming.
Swimming was low-impact cardio that would pump my heart as it downshifted into middle age. It would supposedly make me sehat, alert, even-keeled, strong-minded and noble. And on the way to the YMCA's big, new, shiny pool, I'd see sunshine. My suasana hati would improve.
I pushed open the door to the swimming pool with a towel.
On my first day of this new me, I bought an elastic pink cap emblazoned with the YMCA tanda from the lady at the desk and trudged down the rubber-coated stairs in my favorit peacock-print bathing suit, quietly appalled at the thought of the bacteria smearing themselves on to my feet. I pushed open the door to the swimming pool with a towel. Two lithe, sculpted lifeguards tallied the activity from tall white chairs that flanked the pool.
People were here to learn, to improve, to disappear into the anonymising water as they escaped the chaos of their homes and the unpredictable city streets. Things happened in quiet, slight resistance: water has a buoying immediacy and responds to every minor adjustment you make as you flip-flap down the lane. As time and laps akimulate, you hope it will pay off.
