20 July 2016
Today, I went swimming in Ankeny. during
the 10 minutes when those people under 18 were not allowed to swim, I did laps
in a roped off area. I timed myself doing half a lap, thinking I was swimming
at a generally good pace.
My time was 24 seconds and
something.
It was my custom to pull my arms
through the water normally, and by normally, I mean slowly, well, not exactly slowly but not with an overabundance of
energy, either. I wasn’t stressing to any degree. I was moving my arms through the water with a
deliberate motion. This is what I always do—like I am in it for the long haul
like a distance swimmer.
At times, I’ve been thinking about
swimming faster—about how to do it. How can I swim faster? When I watch people
swim in the Olympics, do they do anything differently? Then for some reason, I got the idea that
maybe I should pull my arms through the water with great effort—try to move the
arms as fast as possible. It sounds like a totally stupid thing to think, but
it was life changing in my world. So, I swam the next time, pulling the arms
through the water with the utmost effort. I didn’t, as I usually do, bring them
through the water in a lackadaisical fashion, just going through the motions. I
really pulled them—as fast as I could. Before my revelation, I was moving
calmly, arm through, take a breath, arm through, take a breath. It was
shooooove all the air out, suuuuuck new air in. I was happy about my form. I
hardly had time to breath. Of course I needed to, but I think I did it only
every OTHER stroke, and even then very quickly.
This reminds me of something that my
friend told me about coaching volleyball. When she was trying to get the girls
to serve the ball over the net, they were failing. No matter how many times she
showed the kids how to do it, they were futzing the ball like a watermelon.
Then, like a top being removed from a jar of elbow grease, one of the girls
said to one of the other girls, “Oh! You have to hit it really hard!” Mind you,
they weren’t saying this to my friend, as if she had anything to do with the
revelation, or that she had been telling them this for a week…no this was as if
the young girl had come up with this idea independently. It was like they had
just been given an injection of blood from near sea level—they started knocking
down serves like they were catching fish at a fish farm. When she thought about
the situation, she realized that she had not really been telling them to hit
the ball really hard. She was simply
showing them the proper technique. The really
hard part was supposed to be assumed. You should do everything as strongly
as possible, right?
In the pool, I got the impression
that my arms were moving like the propeller on a small aircraft. Instead of the
plodding movement, my arms were flying through the water, giving me great
speed. I kept lowering the time from 24 to 21.45 to my final effort of
19.98. How nice to finish by breaking
the 20 second barrier.
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