Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Low-maintenance girl with a high-maintenance haircut.

Recently I have realized some significant problems with my training journal, and I think it is time I took them seriously.

For one thing, I tend to use it too much like the kinds of diaries too many of us kept as adolescents.

Dear Workout Journal, Can you believe that set we were supposed to do last week? I mean, Oh My God, how in the world did the Coach believe that was do-able? And p.s. I think the boy in lane 2 is kind of cute. Oh wait! He's my HUSBAND!

But more importantly, although I try to keep track of how much swimming I do, and what I eat, and whether I get any extra exercise (raking leaves counts!), I have not come up with a matrix for monitoring the ever-growing presence of crapola in my life. Ahem, my work life--details too boring to enumerate, but I feel confident you can all insert personal analogues and know what I mean. And yet, this crapola has a serious impact on my athletic performance.

Or at least that is how I understand what happened at practice last night and then this morning, when I was simply incapable of completing sets that should not have posed significant challenges. Or really any challenge.

And that last night I had a dream about swim practice (having lots of those lately: please, will the psychoanalysts among you help me? 10 cents please). In the dream I was trying to swim a set of butterfly, but I could not get my arms to move forward. It was a little like a drill we do in practice where you swim the butterfly pull like normal, but then on the recovery part, you bring your arms forward underwater instead of over the surface. But in the dream, where I was somehow swimming the stroke but experiencing the drill, it was even harder than usual, because the resistance of the water was almost overwhelming.

Now I realize that I was trying to swim through the crapola that is taking over my life.

So once you realize that your life is spiraling out of control, and that you are fundamentally violating your own principles (such as: Your job is a job, not your life.), what in the world do you do to regain control?

Help me Obi-Readers. You are my only hope. (Well, you and holiday break.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I highly recommend dealing with your problems using long, angsty blog entries. It is my favorite method.

You could also ask Amitai (or the significant other of your choice) to project manage your life.

As we can all see, I have no useful suggestions. I hope you find real help elsewhere.

estaminet said...

Beer! Beer and dancin'!

Anonymous said...

You gotta wash that crap right out of your hair, get a low maintenance haircut and accept low points in your swimming--it is supposed to ease your pressure, not add to it.