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| Just my travel companion reminding me to pack my swim stuff |
I haven’t been writing very much. On some level, the heavy dosages of drugs I was on to fix myself following last year’s breakdown and deal with the stresses of returning to work when I hadn’t quite recovered, seemed to have killed off any sort of creative capability I might have had, and anytime I sat down to write would turn into this horrible, mechanically dry, SAT-passage-like event. Would you like a multiple choice question following this paragraph, complete with answers that make you wonder what the hell you just read?
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| Bondi Beach and the path are beautful. Go there. |
I’m off on an amazing vacation now, coupled with a swim meet in Melbourne. IGLA is here in February for a summer down under, and I’m looking forward to getting up and competing again, and having a little fun doing some races. It’s a hard time of year to be in shape, since it comes on the heels of the holiday break, in the middle of an upturn in work at my job, and at a time when I felt like I needed a little change from the long distance work I’d been doing, and I will be doing (a lot of) in preparation for multi-sport worlds in September this year.
So I entered the sprints, which is a bit of a double-edged sword for me. Previously in my life as a masters swimmer, I have steered away from any and all things having to do with the events I’m swimming this weekend. The risk of comparison to my former self as a swimmer in high school and college was too great, but I think I’ve gotten past that. It’s too easy to think about what my best times were back then, and be disappointed about the large chasm of difference between that and what I’m capable of now, but the reward for getting past that bit of “stuck-in-my-headness” is so much more important. I can’t swim a hundred fly for crap anymore, and that’s ok. Maybe it’s because of the multiple abdominal surgeries I had a decade ago—maybe it’s because the focus on my training has been about very long events, taking hours instead of minutes—maybe it’s because I just don’t have the time to put the hours in the pool that I once did—or maybe none of that matters.
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| Loved the Opera House salt and pepper shakers! |
I’ve joked about how, since I’m not in very good shape right now, I entered the sprints because “If things are going badly, at least they’re only going to go badly for a short period of time.” I suppose that’s not even what it’s about. It’s about separating performance from satisfaction. I can get up, swim hard and have fun, and it doesn’t matter what the clock says, or what the place says, as long as I can enjoy the day.
I often wish I were better at doing this, at soaking in the moments of life for what they are, as opposed to what the preprogrammed agenda says they should be. It doesn’t stop here. It doesn’t stop when I get done with this meet that I’m now swimming off events that were previously best events. It’s the same thing when I get in to the 6 hour bike rides I will be doing to get ready for worlds in the fall. It’s the same thing when I’m buried in a quagmire of engineering hell to fix one problem after another at work. It’s all about letting myself love what I’m doing just because. It’s about letting myself love myself.
