Build it or lose it/Return of my inner athlete

Today I achieved a new “personal best” in the swimming pool. Thanks in large part I think to Pilates, I reduced my 50-yard “swim golf” or “SWOLF” score from 92 all the way to 84!!! The swim golf score, which I learned to calculate in the masters’ swim class I took for a year or two at the YMCA, is the number of arm strokes plus the number of seconds it takes you to swim the given distance.

Way back in 2002 I first learned from a friend that I should be counting strokes and trying to get my stroke count under 20 for a 25-yard length of freestyle. I tried and tried but couldn’t ever get below around 21 or 22. Then, a couple of years ago when I started taking masters’ swimming and receiving some excellent coaching on my technique, I could, once in a while, for brief periods of time, get it down to 19. This was also during the time when I was working out with my fitness trainer Guillermo, and I was fairly regularly swimming for over an hour once or twice a week, with 45 minute swims 2-3 other days.

During my cancer treatment, I mostly quit worrying about time, distance, or anything – just getting into the pool at all and exercising regularly was the goal. I did occasionally count my strokes, just out of curiosity, and noticed that I’d slipped back to around 23 strokes/length. Since I’ve been allowed back in the pool after my surgery 6 months ago, I mostly haven’t pushed myself too hard to get back to the level of fitness I was at before. I’ve been figuring that I should focus on getting used to my new shape -- surgically new, lower-weight, and also using muscles differently due to the Pilates work on undoing long-standing patterns of misuse, under-use, and overcompensation. I’ve also been focusing on doing what’s fun – trapeze, for instance, and, for the pool, I recently purchased a waterproof iPod mini so I can listen to music while lap-swimming, or, when the mood takes me and the pool isn’t too crowded, “dance” in the deep end!

I have a friend who’s in his early 70s, who told me recently that the reason he works out with a fitness trainer is that at his age, it’s not “use it or lose it,” but “build it or lose it!” Though I’m not quite at that age, I have felt like I want to eventually also be moving in the direction of rebuilding the full strength I had before the cancer treatment. Before I get to today’s triumph though, I want to digress a bit.

I was thinking about ‘build it or lose it’ the other day, and realizing that it applies to many things in life. I once read (I think it was in an obscure social psychology book about attention, I wish I could remember the author’s name!) that “every social interaction that does not build trust decreases it.” I think this is true in most relationships, though probably not those where trust is already very high. Certainly it is true in brand-new relationships and “stranger” situations. That initial smile – or lack thereof – means so, so much.

Build it, or lose it. This definitely also applies to building new habits. As my somatics teachers say, “We are always practicing something,” so if we are not working on building our new habits, we are by default practicing our old ones, and are bound to lose track of the new ones we intended to adopt. And, as my high school French teacher Mrs. Melby used to say, every time we do something wrong and catch ourselves, we should immediately do it correctly three times to make up for having “practiced” it wrong once.

Recently, as I’ve been making progress in Pilates, I feel like my body is seriously realigning around new habits of movement, and I can really feel the added power in the pool. I feel like I am riding higher in the water, and the water feels lighter and easier to move through as a result. I have no idea if this image corresponds to anything true, physics-wise. I do think what’s true physics-wise is that with stronger core muscles, and better integration of the arms and legs with the core, when the core is engaged, the movements of the arms & legs through the water have a more solid core to push against, so more of the force is transferred into forward momentum of the whole body. The metaphor that occurs to me here is pushing a rigid plank through water rather than pushing a spongy mass of wood shavings.

Having noticed this feeling of power lately in the pool, I started tracking my “golf” score again a couple of weeks ago. I was sometimes able to get it down to 92 or 90 again, with a per-length stroke count of 19 or sometimes even 18! Then, the other day in Pilates, Collette worked with me on my hand and wrist position – keeping my wrist straight and firm as I pressed down on a bar rather than letting it bend (while engaging the oblique upper abdominals). Adding this to my swim stroke last week felt even more powerful. Today I thought to try the golf score again. Our swim coach used to have us do it twice in a row. My first time through I did a 90 or so. My second time through, if I didn’t miscount, was an 83!! I didn’t believe it, so after a 20 or 30 second rest, I did it a third time, really concentrating on the core muscles and the hand/wrist position, and got an 84 – about 17 strokes per length!!

I also did 100 yards of butterfly today for the first time in a long time – something I’ve only felt up to a few times before, though a couple years ago I began to dream of someday being able to compete in the 200 fly – when I watched a woman do it all by herself at a meet, because she was the only one who entered it! -- good way to get a ribbon!) As I got out of the pool today, I realized I was feeling athletic again, in a way I haven’t since sometime last summer when my hemoglobin started dropping.