Wednesday schmendsday

I am really lucky. When my heart forgets to feel and my brain forgets to think, my body still knows how to swim. There are less than five weeks left in my first semester at OT School. Every day for the past week it has gotten just a little bit harder to get out of bed in the morning. It's gotten just a little bit harder for me to get on my bike and mash pedals to the train station. There's a lot of days where I contemplate not getting on the train. Sometimes, I think about taking the train to the Amtrak station and buying a ticket for the first departure. All of these things are really unreasonable to think about because I am living my dream. But still, it's hard. There's this nebulous that hangs around me. Sometimes it is full of fireworks and the whole world sparkles with every step and every day is the 4th of July.  Other days it is full of the great gaping gravity of nothingness, a black hole I can't outmaneuver. Most of the time I can keep this overwhelming expanse of duality at bay through sheer stubbornness or perseverance or whatever you want to call it. The only way I've found to escape this overwhelming feeling of overwhelmingness is to outswim it.

Between classes on Wednesdays, I go to the pool. Typically, I can get about an hour swimming between my least favorite class and my favorite class. 

Today I almost didn't. 

But I did. 

My completely apathetic exhausted mind turned itself off and my body, it knew how to swim. 

Today's sets, if you can call them that:

1500 m continuous cruising pace (1:33/100m)

10x100m TempoTrainer set a 23 seconds / 25  with a full beep rest between each 100. 

The idea with the TempoTrainer was to always at least meet the beep, or beat the beep in a sustainable way, and treat water for 'extra' rest I earned from beating the beep. This way I wasn't really getting extra rest but completing the pace I committed myself to. It may seem silly, but this is important because in the back of my mind I am always thinking about the potentiality of an ice kilometer this winter. When I'm riding my bike in the morning and can't feel my fingers or toes and my lungs are burning with the cold of the air I think, 'Hey this could be me and the water.' I could be numb and on fire all at once. I could be gloriously unfeeling, but so focused, oh so focused. Like there is nothing else in the world. It's amazing what happens to your brain when you can't feel your body anymore, because your body knows how to swim, and when you can't feel your body, your brain has to see you through. It's hard to explain this mind/body on/off switch thing, but there is this unique relationship between the two I only experience swimming in cold temperatures and I crave it by the end of the week.