Technical Difficulties

50 minutes, 32 laps. Pull buoy, kick board (which I loathe), even some unassisted laps. I am happy.

Also? Nobody goes to the pool on Friday evening. It was me and one other guy, and the lifeguard who was probably bored out of her mind, but who nevertheless wished me good night as I left.

LAPS: 34
YARDS: 1700
NOTES: 3 sets of 4 continuous freestyle laps. Even though I apparently can't kick and breathe at the same time.

---

The riding equivalent of stand up on it is ride through it.

---

Something a friend said in a locked post made a lightbulb go on for me: One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching "non-traditional" students (i.e., adults) was that, by and large, they'd gotten past the phase of trying to outsource blame. It's part of learning how to learn things, more than it's specific to any particular discipline. You don't blame the reading material for being too hard, or the needle for not going where you want it to, or the piano for the fact that you haven't practiced all week. You say, Okay, it's on me and either cowboy up and get it done or accept your failure as the result of your own shortcomings, choices, or inexperience. And when you fall off the horse, you get back on.

This also made sense for me of why, a couple times in the first few months, my dressage instructor checked in to be sure I wasn't blaming the horse for things not going well. I was a little baffled--no, of course not--but my instructor had no way of knowing, without checking, that I wasn't still in that phase of learning how to learn. And since a horse is one of the most sensitive feedback-loop instruments you will ever encounter, I can see where, once the rider starts blaming the horse, things can get locked into a negative spiral very quickly.

It's easy to backslide. I caught myself today trying to blame the other swimmers for the fact I couldn't seem to get a proper breath. And there's a fine line between trying to outsource blame and trying to explain why you're not doing well. One of the two is a necessary part of learning: you have to articulate what's wrong before you can fix it in a way that will stay fixed. The other, though, is a way to avoid learning. If it's the piano's fault, or the horse's fault, or the other swimmers' fault, it isn't your fault, and there isn't anything you can be expected to do about it. But an explanation should lead to problem-solving, even if the solution is only, Do it again.

Ride through it.

LAPS: 34
YARDS: 1700
MILES: 0.97
TOTAL MILES: 282.76
MILES LEFT TO RIVENDELL: 175.24
NOTES: (1) When one is walking into the locker room at the pool is a sub-optimal time for a hair elastic to break.
(2) Still can't do a kick-turn to save my proverbial life.
(3) I seem to have left my swimming cap in the locker room. Botheration.

---

Today I managed a total of ten continuous laps of freestyle (6 in the middle and four at the end), by which I mean laps of freestyle without having to hang on the side of the pool and pant at the end of every lap. Mostly this seems to be a matter of forcing myself to SLOW DOWN. I am not built to be a sprinter by either land or water. So all those laps with the pull-buoy helped me get a metronome going, which I then managed to carry through, as I said, 6 and 4 continuous laps. By the end of the sixth lap I was getting pretty disorganized, so it was back to the pull-buoy and the metronome. And by the end of the fourth lap, it was time to go home. *g*

I realize this doesn't look like much, but from in here it feels like a real achievement.

LAPS: 28
YARDS: 1400
MILES: 0.8
TOTAL MILES: 279.98
MILES LEFT TO RIVENDELL: 178.02
NOTES: Felt like crap when I got to the pool. Toughed it out. Felt like crap when I left the pool. But at least now I'm virtuous crap.

LAPS: 24
YARDS: 1200
MILES: 0.68
TOTAL MILES: 278.38
MILES LEFT TO RIVENDELL: 179.62
NOTES: This was all about the compromise between mind and matter. I started with my right knee protesting the frog-kick in a way that suggested it was because I was doing the frog-kick wrong, so I got all mindful about that and made my thigh and hip do their share of the work. Then my right groin and hip started hurting, in that, Hey, we did not sign up to do work! way. I persisted grimly. Then the left side shin-splint started up in all its red-hot agony. I stuck it out through 24 laps, but as I have a dressage lesson tomorrow, I decided the better part of valor was not crippling myself today.

---

Today I was sharing the pool with a group of very young women. Given what they were doing, my hypothesis is that they are this year's hopefuls for the high school swim team. They spent the last ten minutes or so of the time I was in the pool doing strange swim-cheers that involved bouncing up and down in the shallow end, splashing, and yelling.

Young women, I note for the record, have very piercing voices, especially in the acoustical hell that is an indoor swimming pool.

I was feeling bad about being all You kids get off my lawn! about it, but then I realized that I would have felt exactly the same way when I was their age, only with even more actual fear that they would start picking on me.

As I was getting dressed, I noticed a BEST FRIENDS charm necklace in the locker I had chosen. In celebration, as John Pelham Ratcliffe says in "Drowning Palmer," of the fact that I am no longer fourteen, I took it to the office on my way out. They have a lost & found, so hopefully the young woman who lost it will be able to find it again.

...

Also, "Lost and Found" so utterly needs to be the title of a Booth story.

(Lap swim is from noon to one, so I'm assuming a nominal hour across the board in terms of time spent exercising.)

LAPS: 28 (breast-stroke, with a half lap of freestyle every three laps and a full lap of freestyle every nine laps--after which one leans on the side of the pool and pants like a dog)
YARDS: 1400
MILES: .8
TOTAL MILES: 276.96
MILES LEFT TO RIVENDELL: 181.04

NOTES: Nothing like doing freestyle in the lane next to the guy doing butterfly. Also, my breast-stroke technique sucks.