It is now a full year since I returned to swimming. A year ago I could barely swim 25 meters without a racing heart and gasping for breath. Now the minimum distance I swim is one kilometer, and at the end of that I am breathing just a little heavier than normal.
Even two kilometers is now easy for me. What a huge difference a year can make.
However I do have many dilemmas attached to my swimming. For a start I get much less work done than before. I suspect it reduces my weekly output by as much as a third. The tiredness in the body reduces my efficiency dramatically. People keep saying the stupidest things about it. They obviously do not do any real research or follow logic in any significant way.
The first thing people say is that the exercise will add years to my life. Well that is easy to quantify and there are many studies that indicate that I will add around 2 years to my life. Sounds good? Not to me.
What good is 2 years extra if they are added onto the end of my life, a time when I can expect reduced efficiency? Those years will be valueless if I cannot work at peak performance. Also the figure of around 2 years does not take account of the lost time I have now in both the time expended in the activity and in the reduced ability to work after swimming. If I do have a 30% reduction in work done it is easy to calculate that in the end I would have around 6 years less of productive work time in my life. Exercise is therefore illogical in many ways because work is the most valuable thing in my life for me.
On top of that is my natural dislike of exercise in any form. I simply do not like the feeling of having exercised, I detest the boring nature of exercise, it is like being in a doctors waiting room, excruciating in the slowness of time passing. I often think that I wish there was a waterproof iPod available, at least then I would be able to listen to an audio book while I swam, or a Scientific American pod cast. At least that way I would feel productive.
At the moment all I can do is keep going in the hopes that in the long run I can reduce the amount of reduced work time from the swimming.
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