Steve Lundeberg

The gym where I play handball has a hot tub, sort of kitty corner between the steam room I use about once a year for decongestion purposes when I have my annual cold, and a pool for lap swimmers.

I don’t sit in the hot tub a lot, but I do occasionally if I’m feeling particularly un-limber, as I was on a cold afternoon recently.

As I made my way, wearing only a pair of basketball shorts, from the locker room to the pool/hot tub/sauna area, an older woman passed me in the hallway and said, “There’s a lane open for you.”

So foreign to me is the notion of lap swimming that it took me a second to process what she said, and when I did, I couldn’t suppress a laugh.

“Oh, I’m not swimming,” I said. “I’m just going to sit in the hot tub. The only actual swimming I do is in a lake or river on a hot day, and that’s only if my beer has drifted away from me and I need to retrieve it.”

With that she, laughed as well, and then I proceeded to immerse myself in the warm water and think some more about swimming.

As a kid I’d taken a few sessions of swimming lessons at the Elks lodge in Milwaukie and, while I pretty much hated them — they just seemed like a chore, and I don’t recall the teachers being particularly nice — I guess I did manage to learn something, though if I remember right, I could already swim when my parents forced me to start taking them.

And I do consider myself a strong swimmer in that I spent many, many hours at the Clackamas River as an adolescent and young adult and, unlike a number of others,  lived to tell about it (one of the saddest things I’ve ever done was serve as a pallbearer for a high school baseball teammate who drowned while snorkeling beneath the Carver Bridge; he was a strong swimmer too, but the Clackamas in May is icy cold).

Swimming pools can be kind of fun, particularly if part of the package is some kind of special feature like a big slide or a basketball hoop; in college we had a blast playing water basketball at the Osborn Aquatic Center.

But swimming laps? No thanks.

And I have tried it, btw, though I can’t remember why. Lap swimming is like jogging around a track, only even less interesting and with worse scenery.

And I know there’s a collection of folks out there who are into competitive swimming, but as for me, I have this recurring dream where I am put in charge of the world’s sporting scene and, well, one of my first orders of business is the elimination of competitive swimming (and soccer, but that’s a story for another time).

Back when I was a sportswriter, an annual bit of torture was going over to the Osborn Aquatic Center each February for the district meet of the old Valley League. In a much less computerized era, I was required to stand there, amid the heat, humidity and chlorine, and copy down information from race results taped to the wall.

I would also watch a few races as long as I was there, though I long ago learned that there’s very little about any swim meet this side of the Olympics that you can’t find out just from reading the results and talking to a coach or two afterward. Unless a wild boar gets loose inside the pool area, pretty much if you’ve seen one meet, you’ve seen them all.

And speaking of the Olympics: Hat’s off to Michael Phelps for his eight gold medals in China — the guy’s obviously a superhuman swimmer — but in all honesty, I just can’t rid myself of the notion that basically what he did was win the same race eight times.

It would be like LeBron James beating guys from eight different countries in one-on-one and getting a gold medal each time.

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