Aquatic revelations
I've just realised why I can't increase my swimming speed.
It's because of my habit of 'making the numbers' - assigning numerical targets and round figures to everything in life. (I know precisely how much wealth I want, how much I want to earn, how many children I want, etc etc.) And my swimming time over 1500m - 25 minutes dead - is exactly one metre per second. 25sec for my 25m gym pool; 60 lengths at 25mins. And whenever I've tried to get faster my subconscious has interpreted it as messiness, and forced me back to a metrically satisfying metre per second.
Now I know the enemy, I know a way to beat it! I'll recontextualise my mind to think in terms of strokes not distance - because a stroke carries me about 1.5m; all I've got to do is think in terms of a stroke per second instead of a metre per second. Hey, that'd be 17mins, putting me on the tails of the Elites!!!
It's because of my habit of 'making the numbers' - assigning numerical targets and round figures to everything in life. (I know precisely how much wealth I want, how much I want to earn, how many children I want, etc etc.) And my swimming time over 1500m - 25 minutes dead - is exactly one metre per second. 25sec for my 25m gym pool; 60 lengths at 25mins. And whenever I've tried to get faster my subconscious has interpreted it as messiness, and forced me back to a metrically satisfying metre per second.
Now I know the enemy, I know a way to beat it! I'll recontextualise my mind to think in terms of strokes not distance - because a stroke carries me about 1.5m; all I've got to do is think in terms of a stroke per second instead of a metre per second. Hey, that'd be 17mins, putting me on the tails of the Elites!!!
posted by chrisworth at 4:37 PM
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