Newton's third law

OK, so some swimming today. I don't remember exactly how much, because I had an update with Sal about the whole health thing by Instant Messenger today, in which she said swimming should be OK, and she'd work out the rest of the week depending on leg progress. I have a feeling she said 4 lengths warm-up, then 10 sets of 5. And that would make sense because, with lightning acuity, I can tell you that is 54 lengths, which is a 2 length increase on last time. Maybe this exercise is improving my mental arithmetic? Or maybe we've just got onto my ten times table. But I was faced with a difficult choice just before lunch... Heather IM'd me to ask if I was busy or whether I could come to lunch with her and Nic. Well, when I say, "difficult choice," it didn't take me too long to make it, in all honesty. I quickly figured out that I would have time for a swim between work and going out for dinner with my Team at 7:30.

I set out from the office at 6, but remembered that I had two house guests staying tonight, and had no breakfast, so I nipped off to Tesco first, and got to the pool by twenty past. Now, the pool was laid out the wrong way round. Peterborough Regional Pool has a 25m lengths normal pool, and off to one side, forming a sort of L, is the diving pool. In the evenings, they make swimming lanes by cordoning off the deep end across to the diving pool, to make 25m the wrong way, which leaves the shallow end free for kids and non-swimmers. Technically, it's not a bad idea, although it did end up causing me problems.

Now tonight, the public got two lanes, and there were another 3 lanes for some youth swimming club. So, I had some challenges... the first was, whether I could count in sets of 5. I got my warm-up done, and started to focus. The answer, by the way, is no, I couldn't, although I do doubt, in all seriousness, whether I could have kept count of anything, the number of things that ended up distracting me. I lost count in the second set. The lane was getting quite busy, so I switched, which through me off. I decided, in my effort to swim crawl more, that I should try breathing on each side. After all, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and this is never more true than with exercise, when you should try to balance what you do on one side of your body by also doing it on the other side (which is probably Pilates' third law). I'm a big fan of breathing on my right-hand side, you see. Which means I breathe every fourth arm movement. This is not how to do crawl, but I am much less likely to take a mouthful of water this way. And when I say "take" I mean "inhale as if it were my last breath" (which to be honest, it often feels like). You cannot credit the number of times I've breathed to my left side before my face is out of the water. I have no idea why. Anyway, when I focus on breathing it works quite well, and I actually also get less tired. I realised this is because I often forget to do my legs when I'm focusing on breathing. There are only so many things I can action my brain to do, you know.

And then the crawl is going great, but I keep realising that I'm hitting the lane-cordons and occasionally other swimmers. The lanes aren't super-wide, so I'm trying to keep one cordon close to my side, but I'm all over the place. It took me three or four lengths to figure out why I was finding this so hard. The lines painted on the bottom of the pool were going the wrong way. I didn't have any visual steer below me. I was relying entirely on peripheral vision (on the occasion when I was breathing the right way) and physical contact, without bashing myself too much.

Third, there was an amazing feeling, reaching half way, and it kind of freaked me out if the timing was perfect, where I'd be ploughing along nicely, arm out, breath, face back in water and Oh My God, the bottom of the pool isn't there. It was really rather dramatic. The diving pool is 3.8m deep. I'll be honest, I didn't capture it very well with my photograph, because the one closer to edge just didn't look like the fall away that I felt. It's just as well I don't get giddy. So that was throwing me a bit, but more in an excited way.

What was throwing me in a bad way was focusing really strongly on my crawl and then realising that I was about to hit the person in front of me. The lanes were busy, and everyone was swimming at a different speed. Something that frustrates me even more than people who can't swim (I get an overwhelming desire to teach them) is people who swim strongly but very badly. I swam a couple of lengths of breast stroke behind this guy, and I was taking one stroke for every three he made. He wasn't going that slowly, although slower than my normal pace, which made me feel superior and efficient (I mean, more superior than usual). So the lack of directional travel, the inability to breath under water, the different speeds of people and the depth of the pool, I really lost count.

I got over it though. I have to say that taking a 30 second break every 5 lengths really helped with the counting. And weirdly, so did the block of 5 instead of 4, once I worked out that if I started on an odd number I had to be at one end of the pool, and if even, the other. I became so overawed with my brilliant swimming style, as compared with everyone else in the water, that nothing else mattered (including, as I got tired, my inability to do much else but flail). I really do love swimming. I'm very happy that it gets to be part of my training (being a sort of antithesis of Nigel, who hated it) because I'm getting stronger at it again, which is awesome.

Anyway, rushed home (having gotten told off for taking pictures in the water without signing a form first - I did it on the way out), and rushed out again to the team meal, where I sat opposite a lady called Vicky (she saw me arrive on my bike as well), and once we'd clarified that I wasn't swimming a half-marathon, open water or otherwise, she said "Oh, so you should definitely do a triathlon then!"

Do Sal's spies get everywhere?