Who I am

I'm a 69-year-old person, it's scary to see "69 years old" written, I admit it scares me.

How to survive with this malaise? Well, I don't know. About 5 years ago I began to receive monthly retirement pay, well, I don't have to worry about anything anymore, I get up when I want, I go to sleep the same, I live without working, without bosses, without obligations, what do I want the most?.

After a while I realized that I myself was nothing, that I was an empty being that only lived to eat, sleep, watch television, and let time pass in the most pleasant way possible, in sum up a feeling like being dead.

What to do to change this feeling?. Where I live is a very mountainous terrain with beautiful green landscapes, why dont I enjoy them?. Touring them by car is not an option since you do not enjoy nature, touring them on foot is a highly recommended option but for my taste it is a boring option with few emotions, why not by bicycle? but at my age my ability to ride a bicycle is almost nil since I have not touched a bicycle since I was 14 years old, my strength is scarce since at 61 I had an operation on the spine at the level of the cervicals to extract a benign tumor that compressed the spinal cord and left me without strength from the neck down, the operation went well and every year I have to go for a check-up. Well, anyway I bought a cheap bike and at least I could remember my adolescence.

Surprise I tried to ride it and I enjoyed it, the first days were a drama when a car approached me I trembled, when I climbed a slope I lost my breath, the saddle mortified my butt but I enjoyed it in my own way, after a few months these discomforts were no longer so acute and gradually disappeared.

As I said before, the first days were very hard, every day I traveled about 25 km in a very mountainous terrain, the journey to the highest point had to stop 5 times to rest but I liked it because here nature and The villages are very beautiful as you can see in the images and videos and enjoying them alone and relaxed made me very happy despite the effort. I practiced this activity for a year

I can now ride a bike decently. During my life I always wanted to learn to swim but sometimes out of laziness and other times out of fear I never tried. Why not now at 65?.

It was the month of August 2019, near the town where I live, there is another one that offers swimming courses for the elderly, the duration of the course was only 10 days, but I signed up for it anyway, the first day the instructor asked us our swimming level I told her that water had never reached my neck she laughed.

Every day I went to the pool by bicycle about 30 km round trip with little difference in level, the pool measures 25 meters increasing the difference in level from 1.20 cm to 2.2 meters, the monitor would not let us pass half a pool while the feet touched the ground, the monitor began throwing some hoops to the bottom and told us to catch them, after several attempts I was able to catch one, this is going well I thought, the next day I could catch them more easily, she made us float pretending to be dead and she told us that the human body floats by itself, although I wasn't very sure about the latter since my legs always sank, she told me that I had legs of iron.

Another day she placed us in the middle of the pool and told us to jump into the water suddenly, I was scared but I thought it was better to hide it and jump because otherwise she would think I was a coward and I threw myself inside closing my eyes then I realized that the human body floats in the water since I did not go to the bottom but I was able to get my head out of the water and breathe.

During the 10 days of the course we did several exercises, mostly to lose our fear of the water and she instructed us how to swim front crawl but without much success since many different movements had to be done at the same time such as moving the arms move my legs breathe and everything at the same time and that was very difficult and almost impossible for me, but since I liked being in the pool at the end of the course every day I continued going

Now how do I practice without a monitor? I went to YouTube and put "how to swim front crawl" and I get many explanatory videos on how to move my legs, arms and breathe to swim decently, but doing everything at the same time was very difficult for me, I started first with the legs, always in the shallow part of the pool and with my arms in the shape of a wedge and my eyes looking at the bottom of the pool and my head in the water I moved my legs and moved forward until I was out of breath but I found a solution to continue advancing without raising my head out of the water until I reached the middle of the pool where my feet still touch the ground, many days I saw a swimmer the swimmer put a kind of tube on his head and breathed through this tube, so I went to a sports store in the city and asked for a tube to swim in. The salesman understood that I was asking for a tube-shaped float and told me that he didn't have any and that I should go buy it at a Chinese store in the city, i saw that he hadn't understood me, I explained myself better, then he told me that what I wanted was a Snorkel and he told me that at that moment he didn't have any left, so I ordered it via Amazon.(To be continued)