Zipping by the Loser

Competitive female swimmers dive into a pool at the start of a race.

Yesterday, the Complete and Total Loser went to the college pool he swims in three times a week at his usual hour, 6:00 a.m. This time, besides the other aging men and women who participate in community use during limited hours, there were two women in, he'd guess, their early twenties. They shared the lane next to the Loser. 
They were fast! The Loser is used to being lapped by nearly everyone else in the pool except for women his age, but these women swam like serious competitors, churning the water as they zipped by. At one point, while doing his tired breast stroke, the Loser's left hand accidentally came within a few

An underwater view of a woman swimming freestyle.

inches of one of the women's hands and he felt a powerful eddy from it, like you'd expect from a blender. One altered her strokes, one of which was a butterfly stroke that skimmed her across the surface like a thrown flat rock.
The Loser knows that he's just an aging, slow, idiot who swims with no skill and he's happy to see young people in robust physical condition using their bodies but still ... he has an ego.

The strong girl

This isn't her, of course.

For the past few weeks, the Complete and Total Loser has been going to a weight room in the college sports complex he swims in three mornings a week. He's just swum sixty laps, but he's always liked lifting weights and the machines there are easier on his fifty-seven-year-old joints than the dumbbells he has at home. He swims at six and is there by ten to seven. This is good, because few of the college students are there; it's mostly adults in their forties. Of the very few students there, one is a woman who looks like she can't be older than eighteen. She is fit, but slight—a good fifty pounds lighter than the Loser. On his first week there he saw her using a triceps pull down machine opposite the one he was using, and he was chagrined to see that she was lifting as many plates as he was, and doing it with ease. 
The aging body.
Later, though, he went around and saw that although the plates were the same size and number as those on the machine the Loser was using, the weights assigned to them were substantially less. 
This assuaged the Loser's fragile male ego. 
When college men come to lift, the Loser mentally makes an excuse to leave anon.  

Swimming pool

Today, the Complete and Total Loser went to the swimming pool where he spent many happy childhood summer days with friends and family. The pool, he sees now, is tiny. It can't be more than fifteen yards long. But it was on a nice college campus and there was a large pond nearby with a small waterfall, geese, ducks, turtles and fish. The Loser and one of his two older brothers would put towels around their necks and pretend they were superheros wearing capes.
A memory the Loser has is of seeing a girl, older, with short hair, walking toward the Loser to talk to his oldest brother, who was 14. The girl is singing the song Reach Out of the Darkness, by Friend & Lover. "I think it's so groovy now, that people are trying to get together, think it's wonderful to know that people are finally getting together." The song was current then, meaning that the year was 1968. The Loser never spoke to the girl and he misheard the song and for decades would think it's, "It's the one who buys the house, where people are finally getting together," which of course makes no sense. 

The small, outdoor swimming pool on Eastern University's campus.

"Where are we going?" "Swimming!"

The first lap went well and the Complete and Total Loser felt like he could swim a mile nonstop, like he had when he last swam regularly.
That was twenty-five years ago, however, and after four laps in the twenty-five yard pool the Loser had to stop and spend several minutes catching his breath. After that, he had to stop after every two laps and recover. He is that old and out of shape.
The Loser has always loved to swim. The feel of water giving support. The forced rhythm of breathing once underway. He got serious about it when he spent a few months living in Western Australia in 1989. He lived near an Olympic-size pool where for a dollar he could swim all day. It was an outdoor pool, which suited the climate around Perth. He went every day.

The men's locker room the Loser uses at the pool.

There’s a cliché about learning that says you can’t learn how to swim by reading a book. That’s only partially true. A book about swimming the Loser found at a library in Perth taught him that his freestyle stroke was all wrong. He modified it and began to swim faster and for longer.
His favorite form of exercise—bicycling—is out now because of the painful knee of his crippled leg. The Loser has wanted to swim for ages but, poor and unemployed, he didn’t think he’d be able to find a place to swim that he could afford. He was wrong. A local college offers lap swimming year round in the mornings for just $30 a month. It’s closed on weekends, but that’s not a problem for the Loser in his current unemployed situation.

If it's been awhile, those first laps can be tiring.

The other swimmers are middle-aged, like the Loser. There are only five lanes, but so far he hasn’t had to wait for one. (He gets there by 6:30, which helps.) Swimming seems easy and it is in terms of impact and force, but after doing it the Loser realized that swimming is like lifting a light weight hundreds of times and he felt a pronounced but pleasant ache from it the next day. He still does. Today, his third, he swam six laps nonstop several times. He’ll never be the swimmer he was twenty-five years ago, but he hopes to get in some kind of shape again soon.