Turning up the Pace

In my second swim coaching session with Pete he gave me his precious book, the story of Des Renford, the King of the channel, an Aussie with a wonderful journey of channel swimming. I am 75% of the way through the book, he is 63, has had open heart surgery after a series of setbacks trying to get to his 20th crossing, and is already back in the water, but is also coaching Phil Rush to do a '3 way' I kid you not...who does it in 28 hours, 21 minutes and his stroke count is 77 per minute.

I raise it because at my lesson yesterday Peter introduced the concept of increased pace, what is interesting about that, is that he is talking to someone who lives their life in a whirlwind of pace and yet, while swimming, it is (for the first time), enough to be efficient, with a smooth stroke, no splashing around, no wasting energy. The thought of getting faster was hard, I didn't get the maths, he counted my stroke and reckoned I was doing 56 strokes per minute. (I reckon it is often lower than this...), and had to increase it to add 4, 8, 12 strokes per minute.

As always my brain tells me why that would be hard, (more strokes, more energy, surely less oxygen left...) an ongoing battle between body, brain and lungs. When I was leading a team, a very wise man once said to me,"get a life" (i did have one, but he was referring to the over demanding pace I lived at), and I never even thought about how hard changing pace is for people.

I realise now, that the faster pace is often in response to running away from the stillness that is required to really reflect on the life we are living (well it was for me), and that running out of energy, oxygen, strokes, or roughly translated, exhaustion, was a state of being that I headed into regularly, and being fully aware of it now, I am working to create a life of flow.

BUT in order to get into flow, we do actually need to go through the increases and decreases in pace, to find out what is sustainable for us.

Well, that's what Pete says, and he is, for now, the boss, the King of the water that i listen to...