Thursday, October 7, 2010

OK so swimming is insane

There wasn't a bone in my body that felt like running this morning. So none had to.
Off and down to the pool and stroked away.
Wanted to try this new thing, cause I've felt I am a way too depressing sight for the eyes when I swim, since I constantly have stop after two laps and adjust my googles, trunks or do one of my simultaneous-fake stretching exercises (out of sheer exhaustion, of course). This new thing is simply: freestyle one lap, breaststroke one - and quit the pauses. Non-stop swimming. Boom.

After 10 minutes I felt that drowning was a better option than continuing this and after 15 I nearly did. Around 20 minutes into it I had hard time understanding what I was doing. I forgot to breathe, I was tumbling around like a plastic bag in the ocean on my "turns", I exhaled at the wrong moments and at one time I think was about to do back-swim. Involuntarily. All I wanted was a little rest. That's it. Just a simple, tiny rest by the poolside. There must have been something that was needed to be adjusted. Surely.

But with a frickin' marathon approaching (1 month w00t!) I started making parallells to it. You will experience this one billion times during that race. The lovely urge to stop. Pause. Have a break. Just rest for a bit. See, the human body isn't made to run much further than 20 km at once. After that it's simply exhausted and turns into survival mode.

Every piece of intelligent and non-intelligent desire in your body will scream at you to stop. Don't move. Rest. See that bench over there... looks mighty damn nice to sit down there for a bit, ey. Your muscles will ache, brain stop functioning. Limbs go numb. And many other things you don't want to experience will kick in. Best (only) way to beat this is as simple as it is tough. Carry on. Ignore your body. And just, continue.

As we did today. Boom. I continued for my full 30 minutes non-stop swim. Problemas now is that a) marathon isn't swimming. b) marathon will (probably) last a bit longer than 30 minutes.

Doh.

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