Thursday, February 18, 2010

150 squared

After the exploding forehead i figured i would have lost all my special aquatic superpowers -or average abilities, depending on whether you look at it realistically- but last friday went well in the first training back, so yesterday i wanted to try a bit of a further swim. Now the pool we train in wednesdays is an olympic size pool, which means gods reside in it and throw thunderbolts around whilst being born out of each other's heads. Since they're Greek, they probably also do unspeakable things with olive oil.

However, 'olympic' also implies that the pool is 50 by 25 meters, and i'd been wanting to swim around all 4 sides for a while. That would mean 150 meters, and could be fun. Certainly hadn't seen anyone try it before. Here's how it went:



The turns were a bit tricky, but by the second corner i had it figured out. The strangest thing about it is how much of a mind-fuck it is, since it takes you out of all your rhythms and clues as to where you are in your dive. It's neither a 25-meter pool dive nor a 50-meter pool dive, so the sensations you get become much more independent of distance -i usually recognize points in a dive, like after the turn at 50 it gets nasty, round 80 my body does this, etc. All those markers are gone, and besides this being fun and new, it was good training to get the feelings without knowing exactly where in the dive you are.

The Greek gods were scary, though, and i probably went pretty quick out of fear for olive oil.

2 comments:

Felix Features dispatches said...

My computer hurts from being turned on it's side. Tell your camera(wo)man verticals are no good on video..
Othern than that: well done.

SeBiArt said...

I'm not gonna go so far as to say unoriginal, but I will say not-so-new. I did this when I was a young, fit, and idle competitive swimmer. Now wait - no self congratulations here baba. At your ripe old age you beat my ass by well over 50m. At 14 I was only able to make it 10m short of the 3rd (short) side. :( Congrats to you! You beat my ass (and I'm sure a few others) fair and square.

Now what's this about the govt?

PS - Listen to Felix. My neck was all kinds of wrong after watching it. ;)