Get Swimming, week 10: It’s not fun anymore

Malachy (maybe lazy?) Clerkin

This isn’t fun anymore. We’re four weeks away from doing the Swim Ireland Swim For A Mile Challenge and just now, I really can’t get my head around how it is going to be possible. Unless they hand me an outboard motor, or maybe go the whole hog and put me in a dinghy. I just don’t see how else I’m going to get to the end.

My last session was atrocious. It wasn’t so much that I swam like somebody who couldn’t swim - I swam like somebody to whom the very concept of floatation was alien. My swimming was an affront to marine life. It was so bad, it pretty much did for the theory that humans evolved out of the oceans.

I’m finding tiny things to upset my rhythm. (Ha, rhythm! There’s an idea.) Whatever way I have my goggles tightened, a droplet of water sometimes gets in as I push off from the wall. I can’t stress enough how small this droplet is. It’s a molecule, maybe two at best. And yet I find myself so annoyed by it I want to hop out of the water immediately and demand that the pool be drained because it is obviously and danger to eyes everywhere. Maybe take a wrecking ball to the place, just to be sure.

The problem I have isn’t complicated. I haven’t been training enough. Last week, I missed the lesson with Peter The Coach because I was down the country doing an interview and by the time I got back to the office, the lesson had already been on for 20 minutes so I blew it off. At the time, I felt it was entirely reasonable but yesterday, even as I was saying it to PTC, I was thinking, “You still could have come for the second half, you lazy gobshite.”

And that’s the problem. I’ve been a lazy gobshite. I’ve been way to delighted with myself for the small gains I made early on and nowhere near self-aware enough to realise I was only half-doing the thing. In the past fortnight, I’ve been in the pool only three times. Idiot.

As a result, I have been passed out by my training pals, Laurence and Orna. I am delighted for them. I wish them only full lives and boundless happiness. The bastards.

PTC says we’ll be fine. For the first time since we started, I’m struggling to see how that’s possible.

[ swimforamile.com ]