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Today I tortured myself. Again.

This time it was all about simulated drowning.

Kerry and I joined the Y today. WTF, you might ask, has that got to do with torture, simulated drowning, or anything along those lines. That’s a reasonable question, so I’ll attempt to explain. The story of this latest bout with the discorporeal High Priest of the Spanish Inquisition really began a few days ago.

I’m currently engaged in a struggle for supremacy with my right leg’s Iliotibial Band. It still hates me, and I’m not terribly fond of it either. Right now we’ve almost achieved detente, but it still likes twisting the knife every once in a while. That means that my running has been severely curtailed, and I need to have some more exercise variety than just riding the trainer. This morning I headed out to the gym to try some other form of self-flagellation while HRH Trillian K. Litka decided to go running.

Upon returning from the gym Kerry told me that her left leg had decided to pull a nutty and wasn’t entirely functional any more. Since we needed to do some exercise, swimming seemed like a capital idea. How bad could 30 minutes in the swimming pool possibly be? So, off to the sports store to get me some swimming trunks we headed, followed by a death-defying drive through the mean streets of town. Little did I know that all she really wanted to do was introduce me to the sublime experiences of waterboarding.

The YMCA has an indoor pool. It is heated, 25 yards long, and has lanes open for swimming. Splendid. After joining them, it was time to go play in the water.

The first 10 minutes were fine. No problem I thought to myself. I’d only swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of water. Kind of like the time in a torture session where you think you’re going to come out the other end a whole person.

That’s when the world started to go to shit on me. I haven’t actually swum any distance worth mentioning in over 20 years, and here I was trying to get through staying afloat and making some kind of forward progress for another 20 minutes. My lungs were doing ok, but due to the constant ingestion of pool water I’d probably put on about 200 pounds and was slowly sinking. You know sinking, that thing that happens when you cease to float and then get that almost irrepressible urge to drop toward the bottom of the pool.

Picture yourself floundering along, gasping for breath, trying to swim in a straight line, valiantly kicking your girlfriend in the face and other areas of her body in order to ensure that she make less progress than you do, all the while wondering whether or not you’re going to survive the experience.

And I don’t mean the experience of kicking her, I mean the whole near death experience. Drowning is not my forte, but today I made a pretty good attempt at it. Fortunately I failed and survived the experience. All this in the name of fun.

The descent continues …