1:06.7

Back when I had a lot of free time I spent all that time, at least in the winter, in a swimming pool, It seems amazing to me know that I would spend 3 hours a day pushing waves and then have meets on the weekends. These days it's hard to find time and energy to work out an hour a day. Though when the season kicks in I will be spending entire weekends at tournaments and a good deal of time in practice, but still not 3 hours a day.
Swimming is from whence grew my love of pop-tarts. Getting my license my sophomore year of school allowed me to develop this passion completely. The pool I swam at was 20 minutes from my house and I would be starving when I got in the car to go home. No matter how good my morning intentions had been, a squashed peanut butter sandwhich or a warm yogurt left in my lunchbag just didn't have what I needed. So I would swing into the Hannaford on the way and pick up a box of pop-tarts that I would devour before stepping into the house. I should note that pop-tarts were strictly forbidden chez my mother as they were the epitome of food that doesn't look like food, taste like food, or do any of the things for your body that food should. I haven't had a pop-tart in a few years now (since I got a box as a housewarming present in my last apartment 3 years ago). Last summer I did have a toaster pastry from Whole Foods, but I am pretty sure they used real fruit so it wasn't the same. I don't know why I have gotten off on this whole pop-tart thing. Probably because though I would not like to eat one now, I do love the fact that I used to love them. There were many times in high school when I had a certain hole that was completely filled, down to the crimped edges, by a pop-tart. And a perfect fit is something not to forget.
But I know what I was writing about swimming. The proof of my hours of pool-time when I graduated in 1998 was seven school swim records (I had also swam a faster time that an 8th record, but in a non-school meet and my coach did not let me swim it in school so another girl could have the record and yes I am still bitter). Only two of those records really meant anything to me, the 50 free and the 100 fly.
The 50 free had been set by a girl who was a senior when I was a freshman and I broke it the next year, and kept breaking it until the end. Shaving even a a couple hundredths of a second of was completely satisfying and I relished meets at our home pool where I was swiming directly underneath the wall-plaques with my personal best on them that, with any luck, the fix-it guy would have to come in and amend the next day. I think I started at around a 28 something and brought it down to a nearly even 26.
The 100 fly had been set by a woman named Cathy Luce 9 years before I started high school. Swimming under Cathy Luce's name was like a gauntlet. I knew I would break her 1:09 someday if I kept doing what I was doing but the wait sometimes came close to torture. I did break it I think at the end of my sophomore year at a home meet. My mother was in the stands sitting next to a woman who, when my race was over, got up to go saying, "Well, that's it then." Ms. Cathy Luce. By graduation I got in down to a 1:06. A girl named Stephanie Uecker broke that record last week at the conference championships. I couldn't find the time she swam it in, just that is must have been faster than mine. The 100 fly was the last of my records still standing. So any day now a fix-it guy is going to come in and unstick fourteen letters and a hyphen and then my name will be gone. I think this girl is a freshman or a sohpomore so she will see the numbers switched again and again over the next few years like a pricing game hosted by Bob Barker. It is a little under the skin that something that was so important to me is now completely erased. I do hope, however, that I was her Cathy Luce, that she stepped out of the lockerroom each practice and her eyes went to my name on the board and that when she finished a race she would look over her competitors' heads to 1:06.7 in red stickers. Good luck to her.