Masters

Jeff more or less forced me to go to masters swim on Monday. I wanted to go, but having never been to a masters class and only really knowing how to do freestyle, it was easy to find excuses not to go. I said I'd spend some time learning backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly, and then join masters late winter. Jeff had other ideas. He showed up at 8:30 to pick me up and I went to my first masters class having no real clue what to expect or how to swim anything other than freestyle.

My backstroke wasn't horrible, I don't think, but I'm definitely not fast. Breaststroke looked a little like the above picture. Butterfly looked like this...



...okay, I didn't actually look like a can of Spam out there, but I'm sure I looked like a total spaz. I imagine I looked like I was being electrocuted. Not bad for a first attempt.

The whole point of masters is to improve my swimming. In order to improve, you sometimes need to step outside your comfort zone and push yourself. That's what masters is all about. It's outside my comfort zone, and hopefully it will force me to dig deep and push hard and the result will be an increase in swim speed next summer.

I have very aggressive goals for IMoo 2010, which means I'm going to need to step outside my comfort zone quite a bit over the next 10 months. I need to push myself, which in some cases means allowing others to push me. That's what I've been lacking in a lot of my training, and that's going to change. I plan on doing more group training. Luckily(?) I have some friends who enjoy seeing me suffer so I can always count on them when I need a push. In fact, they're so happy to help out they try to make me vomit. Good friends....good times.

Training officially begins a week from Monday. I've got a training plan to work on...but first I'm going to nap.

I felt the need to include a picture of a nap (why, I do not know) and did a google search and came up with this picture...





I'm still gonna nap, but it's not going to be so easy now. That picture's creepy.