Essence of Swim Glide

Know the Feeling

We’ve barely begun and I’m struck with how much there is to remember — all the things.

I already knew how to swim when I started working on my stroke for real as an adult.

There’s a big difference between convincing instructors you can do a stroke, and using a stroke as if swimming for your life.

Pressing my limit of capacity as attached to an inflexible end & goal that I’ve set for myself is nothing short of a fully religious, body mind gauntlet.

Sometimes overzealous sales managers play the same games with staff, making ridiculous demands by presenting overly optimized clerical and logistic factors on front line marketers.

I’d like to say that progressing slowly toward fitness goals for yourself is a world of difference compared to being bullied into embarrassing one’s self by phone for chump change.

Let me repeat how sad I am that real inner fire can be put out as it gets roped into the same bucket as supposed work quotas — both concepts rejected in the same way.

The arbitrary supposed need of the insatiable, voracious, relentless production machine that only demands more success, can not be compared to the worthwhile life experience of mastering a 1-mile swim.

People who do marathons say it was the best experience in life.

Doing things for them — gradually became an act of self-extermination.

Holding self-grown metrics to myself unlocks the type of innovation that has changed the way I view myself and redefines my picture of what I can do.

I’d been through a childhood of YMCA lessons, and ultimately failed to absorb the rules and point of the "elementary backstroke", which is the single reason I was able to invent the concept of Lazy River, which is swim code for downshifting.

The lazy river concept is how I kept returning to the gym and returning to the workout.

I heard this morning that the heaviest weight you’ll ever lift is opening the gym’s front door.

My mom had me in pools before my 1st birthday. My competitive older sibling was better than me at everything, and just so you know, birth order is a real thing.

Forged in me was a kid that burned to optimize everything in order to compete with an impossible opponent.

I fought the Juggernaut in everything I did. I had to study.

During my junior year in college at the business school, I actually had a few electives and for some reason I decided to take advanced swimming. I remember thinking hard about whether I should do it — winters in East Lansing are no joke and I’d be getting to class on foot.

That’s how I learned to swim for real — from our very legit teacher from Michigan State University men’s swim team - that was 35 short years ago.

My upper schooling is kind of a haze at this point but as I set forth to lock in to using swim for body after 50, the one thing I remembered was “the little flick”, which is the concept of continuing to pull all the way through the arm swing at end.

See a swim armswing is a lot like a work day. At 440pm you can check out or you can be mystifying yourself about both the quality and quantity of what can be done during the last part.

Before I did 40/40 — I knew how to swim. I’d never given myself such an aggressive quota for distance. It’s amazing how far we can travel when we set out to accomplish our chosen path.

As I built my stroke I became increasingly aware of broken elements present. Key word increasingly means I kept finding new things over time.

Starting with a little flick, pressed by gains to be had, improvements that I want for things that help me, I became a maven for personal betterment.

"A little bit of knowledge is dangerous" — How is this all related to swim quest?

Let me say again — like a golf swing, swim is extremely complicated. Since it cannot be unlocked on fast forward, it has to be unlocked piece by piece.

DEAR READER

Swimmers must learn about and practice the pieces individually.

Not everyone enjoys arbitrary Socratic inflections but they add pace. The best swimmers find inner silence during swim, which we use to meditate. The best way to impart knowledge is to ask questions — bear with me.

Life is about being imaginative.

What better topic than pure reality? Being imaginative is a crucial life and survival skill.

You know who has to be imaginative? Poor people.

Despite my fast career start, my life was largely hobbled by various decisions I made and stuck with, as I chose home care family affiliations over what can be had living the fast life.

As a person with very little money, yet flush with time, during most of my adult life, believe it or not, being extremely imaginative is what I evolved to do for fun. I had no choice but to become very imaginative and self sufficient.

Time is a different type of asset.

The Socratic method states that learning occurs best in the form of a question. How could I leverage what I did possess?

My life can’t be about exotic stories to wow my family and coworkers; that possibility melted away ages ago.

Quite the opposite, the joy I have in my life is examining challenges with a microscope.

My goal is to become one with what surrounds me - that I may operate in great accord.

So in a way my whole life is one big body of water that I shape around me - to heal myself.

Centering our mass in the water is easy - when we’re standing in the shallow end. The physics of our bodies change when we lose ability to keep feet grounded.

We must position the body such that our legs have a minimum amount of drag. As a floating object, the goal is to become a gliding object - that is swim.

You the object - must use your own body as a motor to move itself - it has four main parts —

Your swim parts of your body - 1) arms/hands 2) legs/feet 3) skull/crown and 4) posture which all self-propel you - in one direction - this is a swim "Glide".

You’ll inevitably create drag which slows yourself down.

Keeping a glide fast enough to keep your body parallel to water level is not close to being easy.

Staying parallel to the water is all about your skull and your skull is all about your chin.

A beginner may find legs falling far below surface of water; body not straight, legs like rudders.

To this day I still self-talk these commands over and over - Chin down, crown forward. The sub-vocal self reminders are from me to myself.

Like golf or tennis, I can’t give myself 10 reminders at once. I can only remind myself of one thing ongoing then change when ready. It’s so important I do it over and over — for benefit.

Doing something right will have the immediate effect of assisting your glide; soon reminders will convert to muscle memory but before that, we live in a place where we can.. forget the plan.

All swimmers and each person fight a common enemy - that enemy is FATIGUE. Pros fight it, we fight it, everyone fights it.

There are many aspects to technical swim - you need to master them all. To master any of them, you must select just one as the next focus and inner mantra. You have to live it, know it, feel it, ingest and pursue it in proper serial fashion.

Master just that one piece at the exclusion of others - Ignore the rest or be overwhelmed.

If you’re overwhelmed you won’t get it right — Bird that chases two rabbits catches neither.

When you’ve mastered one of the things, you’ll never have to think about it again!

Then you get a new thing.

I can think of a lot of analogies but none is simpler than this:

In laundry we add soap before spin cycle. That’s the order.

We wait for spin cycle before we transfer clothes to dryer, same great order.

You can’t fix or see some things until you fix other things. There is a sequence to it. Imagine trying to shoot an arrow before loading it — Ridiculous!

Now imagine releasing your bowstring without taking a full breath - to the unanointed, this is a non topic yet for those in the know, this is a systematic difference between microscopic success & occupational failure.

Equally ridiculous but only if you’ve already embodied guru level breath work. Some things are more obvious than others - or not. It’s like a language.

We don’t dry clothes before washing them - Things precede others. So, do you release your arrow before or during inhale or exhale or what? Not so obvious.

Tiny bubbles matter - in swim world, everything matters.