Swimming In Six-Eight

It took me twenty-four lengths of the pool to decide that I swim in six-eight time, not three-four. When I swim freestyle, which is approximately always, and I’m warmed up, I take a breath every third stroke. Right, left, breathe-with-right; left, right, breathe-with-left. Repeat a few times until you’re across the pool, then turn.

Consequently there is a three-ness rhythm to my swimming. It’s very soothing, back and forth in sets of three across the pool sixty or seventy-two times, two or three times a week. As I swim I look at nothing other than that mesmerizing black line on the bottom of the pool, while I silently chant the length count with each stroke.

If I lose count of the length count, I check my Apple Watch. Its concentration never wanders into whatever else is going on in my life, like struggling to figure out whether I swim in six-eight or three-four.

With commas denoting breaths, my chant for lap nine goes like this: nine-nine-nine, nine-nine-nine, nine-nine-nine, nine-nine-nine, nine-nine-nine,… nine-nine-nine, turn. Ten-ten-ten, ten-ten-ten, …well, I think you get the point.

I’ve oversimplified. The end of the pool usually doesn’t come at the end of a set of three. I have to do an extra long glide to get to the wall. In the musical score I'd insert a fermata within the last six-eight measure before the turn.

I started taking piano lessons when I was five, and that’s when I learned about meters. Six-eight and three-four are meters, as are weird ones like seven-whatever and five-whatever. My friend Noel likes those weird ones a lot. But they’re not for swimming. At least, not for meditative swimming.

Also, I don’t have the native lung capacity to go five strokes between breaths regularly. My friend and fellow swimmer Ryn claims she takes a breath every eight strokes. She says she has alto lungs, which we all know are bigger than soprano lungs. I have soprano lungs.

Since I was just five when I learned about music notation, I admit my understanding of meters is elementary-school deep. If your music education is deeper than mine, please feel free to kindly or condescendingly correct my explanation, which I cover in the upcoming paragraphs.

Three-four time (3/4) means that three beats are in a measure, and a quarter note gets one beat. Six-eight (6/8) time means six beats in a measure, and an eighth note gets one beat.

Now, you’d think that two measures with three quarter notes each and one measure with six eighth notes would be the same. But music is not like fractions. While it’s true that at a given tempo, a quarter note occupies twice as much time as an eighth note, tempos are not necessarily the same from song to song, or even within one song.

Sometimes you’ll be singing or playing the piano at some nice even tempo, and then you see a marking RIT. That means go to the five-and-dime (the what?) or Amazon, get a box of Rit dye, tie dye a t-shirt with it, put the shirt on and slow the heck down. Chill out, man.

It’s not as if God, or a standards committee (callback to Conversions), has decided that a quarter note occupies 0.4930 msec, and an eighth note 0.2465 msec, referenced to the atomic clock in Lausanne.

True or false? An eighth note from a slow song can be slower than a quarter note from a fast song. True! Hey, Science! Meet Art. You guys think differently but can definitely learn to appreciate each other and work together.

Now I’m going to tell you my elementary school understanding of the difference between three-four and six eight time. Two measures of three-four time would sound like this: ONE two three, FOUR five six, while one measure of six-eight would sound like this: ONE two three, four five six. In the first instance, the ONE and the FOUR have the same weight, the same volume, the same emphasis. In the second instance, the ONE carries more emphasis than the four.

Note: BOLD CAPS is supposed to indicate more emphasis than bold lower case, which in turn is meant to carry more emphasis than plain old lower case.

Six-eight time has a three-ness within each half of the measure, but also a twoness between the two halves, like this: BIG small small, medium small small, BIG small small, medium small small.

Three-four time is a waltz, while six-eight time is a Viennese waltz. You dance a Viennese waltz in two, while tapping your index finger to the underlying three-ness of each set of two. Until your dance partner tells you to knock it off.

My two different arms create the two-ness. LEFT right left, right left right.

If my body and my swimming were entirely symmetric, I’d argue that three-four time would do nicely to describe it. But it’s not. I take a breath in a more textbook way when I breathe left, probably because I learned to breathe left in my fifties. Up until then I'd just breathed right, some motley combination of every two strokes and every four.

Consequently, I tend to breathe with my right stroke like a five-year old, which means that I look sort of forward, at the pine trees with the giant heavy cones, threatening to bonk me on the head, instead of sideways at the locker room where the hot water is turned off so that people go home to take showers instead of hanging out in the steaming water trading notes about their morning swims. And their husbands. (No apostrophe; the discussion is broader than that.)

My swimming form is therefore not symmetric. My left breath is different from my right. Thus I swim in six-eight time. QED.

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Post-script: QED is something you can write at the end of mathematical proofs, when you’re really sure you’ve made an airtight case. My ninth grade geometry teacher said that it stood for Quite Erratic Demonstration. And then he told us what it really stood for, some Latin phrase I've forgotten that means, It is so.