Preamble: I wrote this quite some time ago and then never posted it, my life unravelled and I had little time and zero energy for anything else than being miserable all day for several months. That is why I stopped distributing my wisdom via this blog and in my Instagram posts; my training did continue somewhat, but not with the dedication and single mindedness I usually put into it. But then I found the draft of this post I wrote after one of my last “real” pool sessions which I forgot to post so I’m recycling it here:))
As I broke the surface after the first 125 I realised that -a) my headache was gone during the swim and -b) it came back fast and furious as soon as I took the first few breaths. So now I wanted to give up even more, but since I was on the other side of my “starting wall” I bargained with myself and finally agreed to do the second swim so to end up on the “right” wall and then call quits. At some point in the dive the headache was gone again and I started paying attention to my fins tips and when I came up again, despite the headache and the dread, I was so amused about how I could get so lost inside a few square centimeters of (very expensive) carbon, and now I wanted to see if I could repeat that bizarre experience. So on the 3rd dive after getting splendidly lost again I surfaced on the “wrong wall” one more time and I felt compelled to do one more even if I didnt want to, and each time I promised myself that I would just do one more and then stop and then I couldn’t stop. At n.6 I officially had done the minimum required but I needed to keep going even if I wanted to stop, and it was even hard to stop at n.8.
Some people would say I find more motivation in the stick than the carrot, but that’s not really it, because the feeling of reward I felt after each dive was definitely more of the carrot-kind. I dont even know why I dreaded it so much because it wasn’t really that hard, as I was getting contractions at around 100m, so I didnt have to fight and wasnt much out of breath. But even after proving myself that it wasn’t hard I kept winding myself up for reasons that I didn’t understand. But at the same time those same feelings of dread, near-panic and of survival mode kept me there and focused on the smallest details, as if each little detail was the only thing that existed in my life at that moment.
During dynamic training I always make a point of thinking about my finning technique, number of kicks per lap, playing out each turn in my head before executing it and making the most efficient push off after every turn, constantly correcting my body position etc., because those are the only things you can control especially during a long dive, and nothing else is really relevant, especially your feelings. But this day it was different, I wasnt simply thinking about these things, I was lost inside them. At some point I was so lost that I “woke up” while approaching a wall and I literally had no idea how far I had gone. I had a moment of shock as I wasn’t even able to establish which wall I started on and which direction I was heading, then I decided it must be either the 50 or the 100 meters wall, but no, it cant be 100 because I dont have contractions, but then 3 seconds later contractions came and thought it must be the make-believe contractions that you get just because you are thinking about it – so this must be the 50m turn. But by then I was so confused and disoriented that I got annoyed with myself and came up, and even after looking at my watch and seeing that the time was my slower than normal time for 125m I still had a hard time believing that I did that distance: the perception of time and distance was gone, I could only remember a bunch of swimming but no judgment about how long was missing, how far I’d gone and therefore no feelings attached to an outcome. Those kind of dives dont happen often but when they do you will remember them for a long time.
So whats the point of this post? There’s no point really and I dont know if and how it can help fix your mindfucks, but i write for my own benefit and not your own, so here we are and you potentially just wasted a good 5 minutes of your life which you will never get back.
However, I will leave you with a reflection: because I know how much drama, despair and conflict can go on at times inside my head during a training session, I often muse if the same is happening to my buddies when I look at them standing against the pool wall before a start, wearing a completely neutral facial expression; I can never really figure out if they are feeling peachy or if they are fighting off the need to give up and run into a corner and curl into a foetal position. Have you wondered if others feel the same way as you do? And how good do you think you are at hiding your emotions when you feel a total wreck? Look at your own training buddies closely and see if you can tell.
