Three Strokes, You're Out

So I went for my third ocean swim today, & although I'm still embarrassing slow I AM getting better. Disclaimer: this does not mean I'm good. This just means I'm less worried about dying & can now focus more on my strength & technique. Instead of doing the backstroke & singing Sara Evans "A Little Bit Stronger" or channeling my inner Dory, I can actually swim quasi-proper now although I still sing songs in my head to make it go by faster. It's a survival self-soothing instinct to not think about sharks, seaweed, drowning, etc.

A few of us started a Saturday morning swim group that is the same course we do on Wednesday nights (1000m). Yes I signed up for a extra day of torture a week... for FUN. I just feel like the more exposure I get to the water the better I'll get. And it helps that I'm training with the fastest swimmers :). Like many other aspects of life, when I want help & advice to get where I want to be, I ask the people who already are there. I like to pick their brains and find out how they got to that place and try and soak up as much advice as possible from them because they're the ones who have been on the journey and are "walking the walk".

The only downside to swimming with the bests in a non-race environment is that they swim ahead of me but then wait for me to catch up. My secret is out!! There is absolutely no way that I can hide how slow/bad I am when all eyes are on me. I'll chalk it up as a good lesson in being humble. I am thankful to have all of the pointers though. It's the little things like where to enter the water, how to start the race faster, how to get my wetsuit off less spastically.

I'm also at the "light switch" point where I had previously thought I had pleeeeenty of time to train, to now thinking "oh shit. I have A LOT of work to do in the next few months". So I'm upping the training but having serious doubts about whether I can do it or not. I can tell you one thing: I'm tired and my body hurts EVERY DAY.

I'm thankful for all of the outside help & my motivation to meet my goal, let's just see if I can actually pull it off!