I am about to sign up for the repeat performance of last autumn's swimming:
1. the BHF Brighton Sea Swim, one mile, off the Hove coast, Saturday 30th August
2. Aspire Channel Swim, 22 miles, 12 weeks, 15th Sept to 7th Dec

I am doing this to get fit again so when I go surfing at Christmas I look like this again:


I will organise a sponsorship page in due course.

Tags: swimming

On 9th November 2005, I started recording my swimming mileage with the ASA Swimfit scheme. Every time I swim I record my cumulative distance. Since then I have swum 100,185 metres, which equates, I suppose, to 4007 lengths in total, and also to an average speed of 113 metres per day, or 4.7 metres per hour.

Tags: swimming

btw 2800 metres this morning. just a few miles to go, some 338 lengths. In an embarassingly slow time, due mostly to poncing around on the diving board.
however a complete failure to jump off the 3.5m diving board. I managed to sit on the end of it, stand on the end of it, look over the end of it at the water far far below, watch dozens of other people of various ages jump, dive, fall and perform olympic somersaults off the end of it. 
how do I get over this stupid paralysing fear?

Tags: diving, swimming

Today's swim: 3200metres (which is 2 miles, or 128 lengths of a 25m pool).  Time on that was 95mins, giving me an average mile-time of 47ish minutes. The only real pause in it was a quick exit to the loos half way through.
The battle on a 2 mile swim is nothing to do with muscle power. Anyone who has learnt to swim a mile has figured out how to build in enough rest into the stroke to allow it to continue indefinitely. Or developed enough muscle strength and stamina for the same purpose. The real battle is what is described by many people as "boredom", equivalent to "grinding" as defined a few days ago. It is the mental stamina to perform the same action again and again knowing that the desired result is not in 30 seconds time. 
I took the opportunity to meditate during my swim. My wonderful buddhist teacher, Gen Thogme: 
  
teaches her students to develop the capacity to choose what the mental activity focusses on. Instead of being driven like a kitesurfer from one end of the bay to the other depending on the mental wind direction, one chooses the focus. To start with, for most meditators, the focus is the breath. 
I found this invaluable in my swim. Instead of thinking, "Gasp, this front crawl is so hard, gasp, can i keep it up for another 100lengths, gasp" I am noticing whether or not my lungs are full on the inbreath, at what rate I am emptying them on the outbreath, I adjust my breathing to match the needs of my body and begin to relax in the water. 

Tags: buddhism, swimming

The only bad thing about swimming 2 miles at a go is quite how useless I feel for the rest of the day. 

[There are a couple of other bad things, notably that 2 miles is NOWHERE NEAR the width of the shortest bit of the English Channel, and that swimming for 2 hours makes NO DIFFERENCE to the size of my waist, but I won't dwell on those rather negative things. At least now my maximum swim has doubled in just three months, and speed is improving, and my front crawl is as easy as my breast stroke and back crawl.]

Great concert from Red Priest: a chamber quartet with excellent performance values, from dress to body movement/energy to variety in musical tempo and flavour. Not least the drama of the lead performer switching between recorder sizes at the drop of a hat. There were I think seven different recorders used, from a piccolo to one that looked like a piece of plumbing.

Tessa enjoyed it too.

Tags: red priest, swimming

Saturday: 2000 metres at Worthing swimming pool, called Aquarena. So far I have swum the Channel at Hove, Shoreham, Worthing, Brighton and Crawley. Eastbourne is another possibility as is Guildford, both of which offer diving pools. Maybe I could also swim at Barnstaple when visiting my parents. 

Aquarena's diving pool only has one board - at the 3.5 m height. I stood on it for a while, but they didn't keep it open for long enough for me to fall off it. Grrrr....  I did however lots of headfirst dives from the side which was great fun as the pool was 6 metres deep.  

My front crawl is now good/relaxed enough that I can do 200m at a time without picking my nose very much at all! 
According to my calculations I now need 13 more swims of 2000m each (80 standard lengths) to finish my Channel swim. 
To quote my friend Michaela,  "Wo ist das Problem?"

Tags: swimming

[Apologies for what follows: possibly the worst poetry on the planet. I was bored at work.]

The Internet's a marvel, a miracle of science.
That's what I said to Mary the day I went to Brian's.
Oh no, she said, it's awful; Gates should be clapped in irons.
Computers vacuum out your brains, reduce your self-reliance.
It's true, said I, Gates should be shot or fed to hungry lions.
But removing all your brains is better done with _this_ appliance!
Drew out a straw. She looked at me with terror and defiance,
While Brian sat there glued to MTV's "They Could Be Giants".

[Ignore the poetry! Sponsor my channel swim! I have swum 3 miles already! It's all in a REALLY good cause! ]

[Btw I would argue that the strictures of rhyming force _more_ rather than less creativity.]

Tags: poetry, swimming

 


Just in case you can't see the widget (which seems a bit temperamental) here is the link to that page where you can sign up to see how I'm doing on this swimming lark and volunteer to give loads of money to people with bad injuries: Click here

Tags: swimming

btw my laptop is broken and i am bereaved and bereft, using a P1 with a surfing time of about 5mins to post and check mail.  this is awful!!!

i could sign up to Aspire sponsored channel swim: swim 22 miles over a period of time in local swimming pool(s). time is from mid-Sep to mid-Dec. 10 weeks, 22 miles - you do the maths. Would anyone sponsor me? in aid of spinal cord injuries. 

Seriously I would need some actual motivation to swim 2 miles a week. Anyone got any motivation to spare?

Tags: swimming

 Last week's swimming got me thinking about meditation and the usefulness of thinking. Various buddhist thinkers maintain that thinking is less than useful, and mainly injurious. This was reflected in my first few lengths: "omg, how can i ever do 40 lens without stopping. this will never work" etc. All sorts of diseased, pessimistic negativity telling me to stop even trying. 

Turning the exercise into meditative swimming was much more interesting. I observed the patterns of light on the pool floor. I made a mantra of the number of lengths I had swum so far: " 25 ..... 25....... 25.... 26......". I considered whether or not i should blog on this experience and then realised I was thinking again, and wondered whether or not that was useful, and how one should discern whether or not thinking was useful without thinking about it...... then went back to studying light patterns and mantras and finished my given lengths without self-sabotaging.

Interesting. Bowlby offers us insights into our thinking processes, suggesting we have two cognitive maps: one of the "world" and one of our "self". Bowlby's predatory bird flies his territory,  noting and remembering landmarks. He measures the movement of prey against these landmarks and against his own mental cognitive self-map. Uses these two maps to assess the ongoing situation wrt where he is vs his prey. Is a catch likely? Where should i move to? Against what landmark do I assess this position?

Diseased thinking is a problem if you are Bowlby's bird,  but have been taught an erroneous self-map. If you have learnt you are an eagle but in actuality you have the capabilities of a sparrow - or vice versa. Similarly, you need to have an accurate environmental map to assess your movement against the external world. 

If your aim fails, which of these maps is at fault? And how can you assess this without thinking? (But if your maps are faulty it is due to diseased thinking.....)

[Name? also Steven Covey] tells us that self-awareness is the key to solving human dilemmas: the GAP between stimulus and response enables us to think and to choose how to react. HH Dalai Lama tells us that we need to "think THINK THINK" in order to not simply live out of our diseased gut reactions. 

To think or not to think? It is all a question of what mechanisms to use to avoid and defeat and heal our diseased minds.

Tags: buddhism, swimming