About eight years ago I went swimming with dolphins. Not in some theme park, but out where they live. I overcame my extreme anxiety about boarding a plane that only holds about 10 people and lands on the water because I felt this experience with the dolphins would outweigh any temporary discomfort. After boarding in Miami, that plane flew me to one of the most significant events of my life on the small island of Bimini.
For six days straight, we went out on the boat, and waited for the dolphins that never seemed to disappoint. Always showing up, sometimes two, sometimes five or six…circling the boat, waiting patiently for us to get in the water. We put on fins, and would climb down the ladder and they would graciously let us enter their world for a while. In the wild, you are not allowed to touch them. But in their curiousity, they would circle us and play with each other, and when seemingly bored with us, some unspoken signal between them would occur and off they went.
Or so we thought. As we headed back to shore, they would emerge and swim alongside in unison with the beautiful up and down motion of the waves. Sometimes they would surge ahead and leap out of the water, creating an image not unlike those we had all seen on television or in a photograph.
For several years after, those images would enter my mind when I needed to calm down or couldn’t fall to sleep. They brought me comfort and an awareness that is difficult to put into words. But it seems I would draw upon those images less and less as time went on. Until today.
In preparation for my London to Paris ride, I am torn between my love for just wanting to ride my bike and knowing that I need to make significant gains by having a more structured training plan. I’m smart enough to realize that being in the saddle for more than eighty miles each day for four days straight on terrain that is completely unlike Chicago’s is going to take some work beforehand. So, in my effort to improve on the bike, I scheduled a functional threshold power test, which is a 30-minute time trial on a trainer which is hooked up to a computer. Pros and really experienced riders make this look easy. For the rest of us mere mortals it is pretty much hell on wheels.
After a lengthy warm up, some basic instruction and tips, it was time to go. For the first ten minutes, I paid attention to the coach’s voice, the music, and watched my numbers on the huge screen that was in front of me and the five other people in the room who were riding at the same time.
Soon, I started to zone out, and for some weird reason, the images of those dolphins popped into my head. I had not thought about them in a really, really long time. I was either starting to hallucinate, or something stronger than me was trying to block the extreme discomfort I was starting to experience. From that point on I have no idea either what the coach was saying or what music was playing. I shut my eyes and just kept spinning.
It doesn’t really matter what my final number was. Suffice it to say that it hurt. Bad. But I survived, and when I do this again in six weeks or so, hopefully it will be better and put me that much closer to my fitness goal and to another life altering experience.
Funny thing is, I only have my memories about that precious time with the dolphins…not one photograph. They seem to know exactly when to go back underwater just as the cameras come out. About halfway into the first day on the boat, the organizer told us to put away the cameras. “While you’re scrambling to find your camera, you are missing them. Just watch,” she said.
Wise words indeed.