In my job, I get off at 11:30 am and have to wait around until 3:30 to pick up my daughter. This school year, though, I've joined the Y, so I go swimming there nearly every weekday afternoon. After school I'm busy handling her schedule (carpool, swim team, martial arts), so the middle of the day really is my only opportunity to exercise.

In the fall, when I began, it took me 50 minutes to swim half a mile. Actually, I couldn't even do that. I could swim about five laps is all. Let's say February, it took me 50 minutes to swim a half a mile. I had only been able to get there sporadically because of all the travel I had to do in the late fall and winter (due to deaths in the family). Wait, the car accident was in February...okay, um April. April it took me 50 minutes to swim half a mile.

This week, I swam a half mile in 28 minutes.

The sunscreen challenge, though, is that I go swimming every afternoon right in the early afternoon, from noon to about 1pm. Then I go inside, rinse off, visit the sauna for about 20 minutes and deep condition my hair, then shower and head back to the school to pick up my daughter. I tried sunscreen, but I couldn't reach my back, and it seemed like it all washed off in the pool anyway, in spite of it being "waterproof."

So I have to be honest and confess that I have not been wearing sunscreen on my body until this past week and I'm getting really tan. I'm not burning because I'm in the water 99% of the time I'm outside. Normally I'd be red as watermelon. Now, I love how I look with a tan and so does DH, but I'm getting really freckly on my shoulders and back. A year or so ago, my dermatologist told me "First you get tan, then you get freckly, then you get leathery, and there's really no going back from that." I'm one step away from leathery, so I just bought the Aveeno 70 spf waterproof spray-on stuff so I can apply it myself to my back and shoulders.

I DO wear Aveeno 100 spf on my face, though. It says on the tube it's waterproof. The challenge there is that it affects the seal around my goggles and they often leak, so my eyes start stinging from the sunscreen and water.

Way back then, my dermatologist recommended a laser treatment to get rid of the damaged skin (freckles and the beginning of age spots -- I'm 45) that I had then. I had the procedure on my face and chest - it HURT! But it worked. The freckles turned to what looked like coffee grounds and two weeks later they had all worked themselves free and sloughed off. I had one of those blacklight skin checks and my face looked amazing afterward. Almost no sun damage was apparent.

I think that treatment has made me complacent with using sunscreen now, though. I do use Aveeno 39 spf on my face, neck, and chest most days, but I don't apply it when I'm swimming, except on my face.

I know I'm flirting with disaster here - skin cancer, especially. I need to start using sunscreen all over my body every day, no matter what. I don't want to get all leathery.

I'm not sure what my question is here...I guess I don't have one. I know what I SHOULD be doing. I'm just not doing it.

Roxy