Swimming; bilateral breathing

When I got to the gym this morning there was nobody else in the pool. That's quite unusual. I got to see the water looking very still. Perhaps the cold morning scared the others off as it was below freezing outdoors; the local ski slopes now have agreeable snow and are looking forward to a good weekend. By the time I was finished swimming there were three others in the swimming lane with me. One of them is one of the petite women, the one who doesn't seem to realize she's holding up people behind her. Though, like many, she slows down as time goes on. I seem to speed up a little instead: after a half hour or so I'm usually finding it easier to swim harder. I wonder how that works.

Mostly early on when I had the lane to myself, I experimented with breathing on the other side. That was amusingly difficult at first as before I just did what seemed natural with little thought. I found that I had to think about when in my stroke I actually breathe, and then breathe at the opposite moment, and then I had to think about exhaling after turning my head to the left, instead of inhaling. Eventually I could spare enough attention to also swim fairly normally while breathing like that.

I've had a couple of dreams in which swimming in the pool was difficult because the water surface was difficult to penetrate. The water was easily deformed, one could push down one part and it would come up nearby, it was just difficult to break into.