After last Thursday's 'slit my wrists' swim practice I was on a mission today when I entered the pool. No more of this bloody 'I'm tired!', 'my breathing troubles me', 'I feel stressed by the other swimmers' mumbo jumbo that I've been doing since I started front crawling last September. Today I decided to man up and just get on with it, like I've done with all the other things I've accomplished in my life. I decided to stop thinking that I'm not a swimmer and live by the devise 'if you swim, you're a swimmer'.
I did stall getting into the pool though. I started my day with a 7am Body Pump session, then avoided the pool and went to a training day for one of my jobs. After the training day I went to the gym again, only to then do some speedwork on the treadmill. Having run a good 5k at threshold pace (13k/hour) I couldn't stall anymore and had to get into the pool. My goal was to swim 1k front crawl but in an attempt to psyche myself up for it (and actually do it!) I decided to swim sets of 200 metres front crawl (10 laps) at a time, with two laps of back stroke in between the sets. I purposely swam slowly, constantly telling myself not to care how slow or bad it looked, and voila! 1k front crawl done! I don't know how long it took, as I can't see the poolside clock (damn being shortsighted!), and frankly....I don't care. Today was all about persistence and getting the laps done, and less about speed and style. Speed and style will come, if I persist and get the laps done - so that's what I'm going to do from now on.
And you know what?! Today I actually felt a little bit like a 'real' swimmer!
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