100 Laps Yesterday, and Younger Next Year

Given my schedule with my son Danny and the fact that the pool is open only at limited weekday times, my swimming routine is that I try for four days a week and sometimes only manage three days. I add in other exercise -- walking, running, maybe a little tennis with my pal this weekend? -- as I can, and it is working pretty well.

The structure of my workouts is to include one "long" day each week, with two or three other days on which I am trying to follow an old training principle from distance running, which is to add no more than about 10% to the distance of my workouts, week over week. That's been going great and I've gone from 16 laps my first day in the pool May 19 to half a mile (36 laps) on my regular workout days this week.

Yesterday was my long day. I did 100 laps. 80 laps without a rest, then I had to get out of the pool for a pit stop (and to stretch out a slight cramp in my toes), and then the final 20.

2500 yards.

1.42 miles.

I was in the pool for an hour and 20 minutes. If someone had told me 10 years ago that I would ever in my life spend an hour and 20 minutes swimming laps in an indoor pool I would have laughed out loud and said "you don't know me."

But I am enjoying it, thinking and imagining and ruminating as I swim, feeling better conditioned every day, and the endorphins, have I mentioned the endorphins? I went over to my pal's after my workout and sat on the sofa watching the Sox and she looked at my big silly endorphin-laced grin and said something along the lines of "You so goofy."

Yes indeed.

And that's not all.

You may recall that a few days ago I set a little side-goal alongside my usual cumulative goal of losing a pound a week (on which I am on track). Seeing that I had a shot at reaching it, I decided to make an effort to get "into the 240s" weight-wise by July 1.

So today I stepped aboard and weight in at 249.6, thanks in large part to my nice long workout in the pool yesterday.

It may come as no surprise to you that I like getting various kinds of positive feedback for my efforts. It helps to motivate me. Sometimes the feedback comes from others, and sometimes it comes from writing things down, keeping track, and charting my progress. It makes me feel good. I like to feel good, especially if in some small way I have earned it.

Getting into the 240s is good positive feedback, that will help me continue on this path. So is the progress of what I am able to accomplish in my long workouts over the past 4 weeks:

6/5 - 30 laps
6/11 - 36 laps (1/2 mile!)
6/16 - 48 laps (2/3 mile, no rests)
6/23 - 72 laps - 1 mile!
6/30 - 100 laps - 1.42 miles

And so are the endorphins.

And it's no accident that I got a haircut yesterday and I am going to the dentist this afternoon. You don't want to know how long it has been since I went to the dentist. But there's a trend here, and it's not all bad.

Without putting too fine a point on any of this, I'll just reference one of the section headings from a great book that I am reading on my Kindle thanks to my friend and college classmate Len Edgerly, he of the The Kindle Chronicles podcast. The book is entitled Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You're 80 and Beyond, by Chris Crowley and Harry Lodge. (It's also available in paperback). I don't usually cotton to such books, but this one is intelligent, packed with a lot more interesting information than most fitness tomes, and totally on my wavelength.

The section heading that caught my eye?

"Just Say No to Yasir Arafat"

Just so.

(P.S. - My friend Ned asked me to post the recent photograph above showing the gills that are growing on my body. I couldn't get a profile view which would have been clearer).

Related posts:

Getting Younger Every Year - and a Good Weekly Weigh-in

Romance Leads to Regimen Leads to Results

Am I Not Pretty Enough? A Good Weekly Weigh-In and a Great Start to the First Full Week of My 60th Year

I've switched my weekly weigh-in day to Mondays in order to accommodate my, er, summer travel schedule, and today's number -- 252.8 -- continues my great progress: I've completed three weeks of BMGS 2.0 and have surpassed my pound-a-week goal by dropping 4.2 pounds over three weeks. Especially good since the past week included lots of birthday festivities for me and Danny, and I did not pass on the cake.

24 laps this morning to get the week started at the pool, and it felt like a snap.

I love this song. I don't know Kasey Chambers from Casey Jones, but I love this song.

So simple

I was talking with my pal this morning, after my swim.

I hadn't been sure about my swim. I was physically tired yesterday. I needed to skip a day at the pool and that's what I did. Felt right. Even thought that maybe -- what with the pool being open for adult swim Monday through Friday -- I should start scheduling a regular mid-week day off from the pool. Then I had a bit of a comfort-food dinner last night and, well, when I rolled out of bed at 7 this morning I wasn't feeling like a paragon of physical discipline. (Which is good, because I am not).

Got myself to the pool though. But once I was in the water, I didn't think I would be able to complete 10 laps. I just felt like I was working harder to swim than I had been working lately. plus, and this is important, there was the thing about not feeling like a paragon of physical discipline. My feeling like I hadn't been with the program yesterday sapped my motivation to get back on it today. Not the blues exactly, but it is definitely an ingredient of the blues, that thing where your brain starts working against you, negotiating with itself against your better angels, making deals to let you off easy.

But I persevered. I had a feeling that brain was at work, and I also had a feeling that the best thing to do was to work through it.

So I got to 10 laps and I kept going. I've been doing 22 laps a day the last 3 or 4 times I have been to the pool. Once I got to 10 I was pretty sure I could get to 22.

And then I kept going. Yes I did. Past 22 laps, two at a time, until I had completed 30 laps, feeling strong, and 750 yards.

Sitting here typing, I feel my arms, my legs, and my confidence that I am back on track. I came back and had a high-protein bachelor breakfast. You don't want to know. Okay, what the hell. I had a can of sardines. I like sardines. My sister Deborah, a very knowledgeable foodie, says they are really good for me. Maybe not if I have a date soon afterward, but otherwise.

Anyway, that brings me back to talking with my pal. She was at her office, a little after 9, telling me she had been feeling foggy all week, not getting much done.

Whoa, said I. I kind of recalled her finishing some big projects on Monday and Tuesday, and I also recalled that what she had done on Tuesday, which is a work-at-home day for her, was exactly what she had planned to do. I pointed this out. "Oh, yeah," she said, and I could tell that she was sincerely surprised.

"So, in fact, you have been feeling foggy and not getting much done for a day," I said. "A little different."

I'm just saying. Isn't it interesting how are brains are constantly negotiating with reality, revising our sense what we have or have not done and how we feel about it. And it isn't always a good thing.

Far be it from me to tell my pal how to think about her work, but with me -- especially on this BMGS 2.0 campaign of mine -- it really matters that I write things down just about every day, and make sure I give myself credit for what I do. Otherwise I might have managed to get in the pool this morning thinking I hadn't accomplished anything, or eaten in a healthy way, for days. I might have allowed myself to give in to my brain with the notion that it didn't really matter what I did today, because I had been drifting so aimlessly.

Instead, I had a great day in the pool, a good healthy smelly breakfast, and I have going to have some cantaloupe and toast before I clean the house a bit before Danny comes over in a couple of hours.

And I'm on track for another happy weigh-in on Sunday.

Life is so simple. Much more simple than this troublesome brain of mine.

Romance Leads to Regimen Leads to Results

Among the thoughts I was thinking as I swam 18 laps at the pool this morning after the scale told me ever so sweetly that I was down another pound since Sunday's weekly weigh-in:

From the Fall of 1966 to the late Spring of 1968 (with the aid of a full scholarship which I am too hung up on class issues not to mention here), I attended Mount Hermon, a boys' boarding school set amidst astonishing beauty on the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts. A few year later, happily for its inmates, it was joined with an affiliated girls' boarding school across the river and has been known ever since as Northfield Mount Hermon, or NMH. But while it was just MH, its institutional notion of inter-gender social interaction centered around Saturday night dating events between the school and an extremely active traffic in sometimes perfumed letters between zip codes 01354 and 01360.

While I may not be an expert on normal, I can tell you that this structure of deprivation and brief, intense interaction (and yes, I can assure you that it was intense) was not normal for 16- and 17-year-old boys and girls.

I bring it up now not to launch into any amateur anthropology about teen dating, but because for me it introduces an important discussion about how we motivate ourselves to achieve or maintain higher levels of physical fitness.

Toward the end of my junior year I met an interesting, edgy, pretty girl from Flushing named Meredith. Merry and I dated perhaps a dozen times before school broke for the summer, and while I doubt that either of us would have said we were "in love," I for one had certainly achieved a happy state of limmerance. (It would be ungallant for me to speculate as to what Merry has achieved, but she did write to me and speak to me on the phone, and there were kisses).

That summer I had a great job as a fledgling sports writer covering the Cape Cod Baseball League, and I rented a room in Hyannis just a few hundred yards from an old, not very well kept cinder oval track. Although I was working well over 40 hours a week, nearly every day that summer I went to the track with my stop watch for intense, solo track workouts in which I tried to repeat as many 70-second quarter-mile laps as I could each day without any real sense of how to use rest days or even jogging recovery laps. I had no coach, and I would just run until I couldn't run any more.

I was pursuing a regimen with two purposes:

• I was working to get my time for running a mile as far under 5 minutes as possible, so as to insure I would be a worthy contributor to the varsity cross-country and track teams at Mount Hermon during my senior year; and
• I was doing all of this to please Merry, to impress her, to attract her, and perhaps even to make her want to smile at me and kiss me.
  

Now, as it happened, Merry could not have cared less about cross-country, track, or my time for the mile. She may have found some appeal in the temporary "sixpack" and muscles that were natural concomitants of the athletic accomplishments for which I was training, but I wouldn't put too fine a point on that. Long story short, her parents did not approve of the age difference between us, or perhaps of me, and they succeeded in putting the kibosh on our romance, as parents sometimes do, often with good cause.

But that didn't matter. The point is that romance led to regimen led to results. My attraction to Merry, and my desire to attract her, played a powerful role in my capacity to get to the track on a daily basis and do what I thought I needed to do there.

What I was doing at 17, although I was far from figuring it out then or in several other times since when I have acted on similar motivations, was tapping into forces older than our species itself. I won't try to offer any finer explanation here, but it would be foolish not to realize the power of these forces or to let them assist us when they are available. My life in this my last week as a 58-year-old -- and specifically the fact that I am what is called "single" -- is not all a walk through an open field. But to the extent that it has put me in a position to experience limmerance again -- and to say any more here, about that, would to get ahead of myself -- is nicely beneficial and even motivating to the ongoing efforts of BMGS 2.0.

I didn't plan it this way. But I'm happy to have it working for me.

The Yardbirds said it all, of course:

Yardbirds - For Your Love
Lyrics

(Graham Gouldman)
For your love.
For your love.
For your love.
I'd give you everything and more, and that's for sure.
For your love.
I'd bring you diamond rings and things right to your door.
For your love.

To thrill you with delight,
I'll give you diamonds bright.
There'll be things that will excite,
To make you dream of me at night.

For your love.
For your love.
For your love.

For your love, for your love,
I would give the stars above.
For your love, for your love,
I would give you all I could.

For your love.
For your love.
For your love.
I'd give the moon if it were mine to give.
For your love.
I'd give the stars and the sun 'fore I live.
For your love.

To thrill you with delight,
I'll give you diamonds bright.
There'll be things that will excite,
To make you dream of me at night.

For your love.
For your love.
For your love.
For your love.

Taking the Red-Eye

Maybe you can tell me that this isn't pathetic, or that pathetic is the new something or other and I should just embrace the pathos.

Or maybe you can tell me what I should do to protect my eyes from the chlorine in the pool. I walked to Walgreen's an hour ago because I didn't trust my ability to drive. But jeesh, this is extreme.

I bought some Naphcon A "Eye Allergy Relief" drops, and I have taken them twice. Er, applied them. (I do know enough not to drink them).

And I also laid out $3.99 for some cheap-o Walgreen's eye goggles. I got blue. I figured that was my size, not pink.

So, anyway, this is going to be a short post. I swam 16 laps today and felt great ... until about 3 hours ago.

When I was having dinner last night at Paparazzi to celebrate two inexplicable checks in a week from Google Books, my good friend told me that my eyes were red. I had noticed they'd been watery earlier in the day but I just thought (time-shifted viewing reference coming up here) that I was being a sap because Jack Bauer's daughter was risking her life for him. My friend asked me if I was wearing goggles in the pool. I hadn't noticed any goggles. Google, goggles, giggles, is it really up to me to notice all this?

This morning I got to the pool a little later, but I had a great swim and ran into an old organizing colleague, Michael Brown. I also noticed that about half of the people were, indeed, wearing goggles. So I figured I would pick some up over the weekend.

Until my eyes started burning like Jack Bauer had just released the canister right here in my home office.

Live and learn. But you know I will be back in the pool tomorrow. Looking like all the other Martians.

You Getting Up in the Morning, or, in This Case, Me

I'll start with a few basics today:

• Calorie intake yesterday was about 2,000, including a healthy chicken fajita salad with iced team and only moderate chip-picking with my friend and ex-bro-in-law Pete at Jose's for lunch and a two-stop dinner (cottage cheese with apple sauce and Kashi at 6 and a vegan tofu-kielbasa quesadilla when I finished my weekly Kindle Nation newsletter at midnight). (Yes, I occasionally eat at midnight, but I try not to do it without a plan. More on that later).
• The scale is moving in the right direction, down from 257 to 256.2 today. (Yes, I have a scale that measures tenths and I do weigh myself every day. More on that later).
• Probably most important of these three items, in the long run -- I was back in the pool at 7:15 am and moved up from 12 laps to 14 laps, or 300 yards, with a slightly higher and thus more intensive ratio of breaststroke to backstroke.
  

The swimming feels great. It is taxing, and of course since I am already swimming more than I have swam, swimmed, or swum in over 25 years I notice that I am breathing heavily at the end of each two-lap segment. I take a little 60-to-90-second break between each segment and then start flailing my arms again. Each day, for now, I will try to add two laps to what i did the day before. We'll see how that goes.

I wondered if I would just be bored to death by the likelihood that I couldn't do enough to feel like I had done anything, but 12 laps and 14 laps on the first two days isn't a bad start. Those who've read my Boston Sports by the Numbers blog will not be surprised to learn that in my marathoning and coaching days I used to have a lot of fun paying attention to times, workout stats, interval clockings, and the like. Certainly swimming couldn't offer me that kind of juice. Then I noticed two guys in the lanes to my right this morning, consulting a printout after each segment and telling each other things like "dolphin down, butterfly back" and "19 strokes down, 15 back." So I started to realize that there might even be a future for a guy like me in the pool. They were doing 88 laps this morning, 1100 yards. I know 88 laps is a lot more than 14 laps, but somehow it didn't seem impossibly far away, today.

When I got out of the pool, showered, dressed, shot a couple of baskets at the outdoor hoop and walked to my car at 7:50 am, I felt terrific, maybe better than a heavyset 58-year-old guy has any right to feel before 8 o'clock in the morning. I had an impromptu breakfast with a pal and was doing productive work at my desk before 10.

Over breakfast, my pal and I talked about getting up in the morning. You'd think we would have it down by now. I've done it 21,535 times, and my pal has done it hundreds of times more than me. But my impression is that there is a constant need to re-train ourselves.

When my kids had to be at school at a certain hour, or I had to be at work at a certain hour, or both, it was relatively easy even if it was not always fun. But even then, there is a lot of difference between, say, rolling out of bed just in time to shower and get to work by punch-in time, and getting out of bed on my own time, early, with a plan to do one or two simple things aimed at getting my day and me off to a good start.

Meditation, swimming, running, coffee and a book on the deck, a walk around the neighborhood -- it can be any of a number of things, but for me and most others to whom I have spoken about such things, spontaneity is the enemy of success in such endeavors. Our brains are powerful, and most of us, when in bed, like to stay in bed.

When I have been most successful at using my mornings to get my day off to a great start, the key to success has been to make a plan -- "get up at 6:45 am and be in the pool by 7:15," for instance -- and allow myself no negotiation, or even any thinking, until I am inexorably on the path I have planned. In my own case, I actually pretend that I am being operated externally by remote control. (In my 12-step program, we call that "turning one's will over to a higher power.")

Maybe I am dumbing myself down, but the payoff is huge.

In my next post I'll try to come back to those "more on that laters" about midnight meals and daily weigh-ins.

Have a great day. I will.

(Thanks for the beautiful picture of the sleeping polar bear to my brothers and sisters at http://www.firstpeople.us!)