Journey across the channel

location: home

mood: amused

music: the Donnas - Fall Behind Me

I hear that a lot at this time of year because I’m doing a lot of sets involving 100s because:

1. Back home my team is doing the killer quad.  It includes a one hour swim on or about Halloween (October), 50x100s on or about Thanksgiving, 75x 100s on or about Christmas and 100x100s on or about New Years.  I didn’t have the money to go home during the holidays and want to feel a part of something.  Besides Alcatraz won’t move here this year….


I'm also doing multiple sets of 100's because of number two.

2.  I am trying to establish a significant base but that base isn’t only physical, it is mental. 

I hear these comments from swimmers training to swim a Channel – English, Catalina, Santa Barbara, etc… or some other really long water based swim that could easily turn into 20+ hours. 

And I have to think to myself, yes it is boring.  Yes, it is monotonous but it is training your brain to handle long periods in the water and those times during swims when you hate what you are doing.  The times you ask yourself ‘why did I sign up for this again’ and cry into your goggles underwater.  It helps you realize those times won’t last; they are a temporary part of the whole.  You just have to get through it and you can handle the next 5 minutes and then negotiate for another five minutes. 

I know a lot of swimmers that got out of a long swim because it was ‘boring’ or because they couldn’t control their minds for long periods of time or because they didn’t understand that it is an exercise in ‘sensory deprivation’ when you are horizontal and wet, just repeating the same motion for long periods of time… 

From the Wiki on Sensory Deprivation:

Though short periods of sensory deprivation can be relaxing, extended deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and antisocial behavior.(1)

Had to put that in...
 

These people didn’t get out because they were physically incapable or having a problem that wouldn’t resolve but because they couldn’t turn their minds around.  They couldn’t get in the zone, go with the flow, just endure, or entertain themselves until the next change happens…

I’m not sure that this isn’t applicable to the everyday monotony of life.  Let’s face it if you love to do dishes, wash clothes, windows, vacuum, and mop floors, I would probably adopt you.   But let’s face it OCD people are high maintenance, so maybe not… 

But it has to be done along with redundant work at school or the job.  Money helps us follow our passions and hopefully education gets us there. 

You do have choices in this, hate it, avoid it or make it creative. 

I’m avoiding finding the remote I lost in the middle of the night but eventually I will have to go on a treasure hunt, who knows what is under that bed?  Last time I found $5 I didn’t know I was missing.

So yes, it is boring if you let it be.  It is monotonous if you aren’t creative.  And it will serve no purpose unless you assign one to it… 

(1) Stuart Grassian Psychiatric effects of solitary confinement(PDF) This article is a redacted, non-institution and non-inmate specific, version of a declaration submitted in September 1993 in Madrid v. Gomez, 889F.Supp.1146.