March 13th, 2012: Proving once again there is no definable rhythm or reason to daily weight loss, the scale stayed the same. This despite THREE workouts yesterday. One of which was 2 hours long. I’ll admit I went overboard, but the weather was so beautiful in my part of Idaho yesterday that I had to go out and enjoy it as much as possible – and that meant a long slow run around the part of the Snake River that passes through my town. Plus today is picture day, and I wanted to try for 10 lbs. in two weeks. Oh well.
I have mathematically proven the secret to a happy life, though, and I did it yesterday while running. In English, the equation is happiness is equal to your hopes and dreams minus your reality. The closer you can get the final number to 0, the happier you are (kind of like a golf score: lower is better). Check it out:
How about trying for the lowest score possible, but never a negative score (a low score means that your dreams and reality are pretty close to being equal, which means your dreams have come true, of course it could also mean you don’t have many dreams). The nerd in me will never entirely die.
March 13th, 2020: It seems like many seemingly impossible tasks are best broken into small chunks. With this whole swimming challenge for the triathlon, however, the chunks were supposed to get larger and larger until they melted into one session of non-stop laps. After all, where was the side of the pool in the middle of Rigby Lake? What was I supposed to do when I needed to take a break then?
But you Andy Dufresne (Shawshank Redemption) this stuff and all of a sudden, the concrete will crack, and then it will crumble. And that’s what happened with swimming. Please don’t misunderstand me, I have given up and given in when it came to other challenges in the past, but this time I simply couldn’t give up. One day I just came, and I saw, and I fucking dominated. I hit 5 laps and didn’t stop, so I did 6, and then I continued until I had hit 18 (if I remember correctly). All I know is that I could have kept going until the sun burned into a cinder.
I don’t know what happened that day. I can’t tell you that I did anything different. I never did anything different for damn near a year, at least anything that would affect my ability to swim. All I know is that I learned that when people tell you to never quit trying, they speak the truth. The wall will come down. Here is where maybe a universal higher power will sometimes throw the tenacious person a bone. Tenacity is borne of desire, and for me, the desire was borne of fear. A little fear ain’t so bad, it’ll get you outta bed or off your ass sometimes.
I was now able to swim the number of laps equal to the distance of the swim length of a sprint triathlon. The snow was gone, Rigby Lake was most of the way full. It was time to take this confidence in my swimming ability to open water.
To be continued…
