Spring Break

...on the beaches of Puerto Rico. It seems like a dream now: sunshine, beaches, and nothing to do but swim up and down the beach, read, and try not to step on sea urchins. Oh - and read a few lines of First Aid to satisfy that nagging feeling that one ought to do something for boards.

I am not the kind of person who takes relaxing vacations. In fact, they are usually quite the opposite. So this was the first vacation that I've had in a very long time that was truly a vacation: good books (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - a highly recommended read about the origin of HeLa cells, bioethics, and the interaction of science with the patients behind it), cheap food, and pleasant company.

Firsts: jumping 20 feet into a pool at the bottom of a waterfall, swimming a quarter mile in the ocean, eating breadfruit, and almost being swept out to sea on a paddleboard (but that was because my friend and I lay down, daydreaming and watching clouds for about ten minutes until we realized how far the current had taken us). When I got back to shore I realized that my difficulty paddling was because I had paddled the board in backwards, having inadvertently faced the opposite direction when I had gotten up so the fin was actually in front of me. My friend's comments on my slowness to get back to shore: "I didn't want to leave you behind, but I also didn't want to be swept out to sea." Thanks, friend.

Because we were on the Caribbean side, the beaches were calm and so I spent a great deal of time swimming. I was not a good or confident swimmer to begin with, but now I am more comfortable swimming out farther from shore than I can touch the bottom and knowing I can actually go a reasonable distance without becoming exhausted. I also realized while doing the crawl ("freestyle") that you're supposed to turn your head and breathe before you stroke with your arms. I also realized that I wasn't breathing often enough, so that was why I was becoming exhausted swimming. Those issues resolved... I realized that open-water swims really are lovely (no walls and no chlorine!), so hopefully this will be the foundation for eventually entering a triathlon. I know the running and biking I could do, but my swimming skills until this trip were absurdly poor. Now I feel more confident about working up to the distance necessary.

The only bad part of the trip was getting back to the city and realizing it was 40 degrees, raining (it had sleeted that morning), and that everything was gray, and everyone was dressed in funerary black. I hadn't realized how dreary things were until I had something to contrast against.

And today... it is scheduled to snow.