Have you got the swimming switch?
About a month before our last triathlon of the season, I watched a documentary (if you can call it that, it was a short youtube video) about this chap Martin Strel, who is one of the greatest marathon swimmers (in my opinion) at 62 years old! He’s swum the Danube, Mississippi, the Parana, the Yangtzee & the Amazon!
It’s a great view if you’ve not seen it and pretty inspirational – link at bottom of the page.
In the clip, Martin talks about how he “found the way” he “doesn’t feel the pain anymore”. I was intrigued…
As I’ve mentioned (once or twice before?!) I’ve swum my entire life. I grew up with a pool in our back garden and from an early age was swimming lengths underwater, but I was never really too bothered about distance.
Until my foray into triathlons, I still swam regularly because of my surfing, but I never had a specific goal of lengths vs time that I was trying to achieve. Once you start to pack in the kilometres, you start to notice arm fatigue (amongst other fatigues ;-).
We’ve all experienced it. When you set off on your laps, you get to about lap 20, feel muscles working, things pulling. By lap 40 you’re thinking only 20 more to do your 1500m. Arms are tiring and you’re only focused on the end goal.
But after watching that short video, something clicked in me that meant I could just keep swimming. I’d get in the pool and before I knew it I was swimming 2km without even really noticing it. I could just keep swimming. I’ve always loved swimming, but I started to love it that bit more.
When it came to tri day a few weeks ago I dove into the sea and just swam. I was thinking about nothing else apart from how warm the water was. How lucky we were to have little surf. Where was my TriPal and was she ok? And, how quickly I was catching up on the wave in front of me. I was thinking about everything else, other than swimming!
Turns out it was one of the best swims I’ve ever had, coming out of the water in second. What a result.
Maybe it’s a combination of 11 months of training and putting in time to get the distances nailed, but I can’t help think that part of it came from watching that inspirational man.
Have a watch for yourself. Hopefully you can get the same inspiration!