Trying Something Different… like Swimming

I decided earlier this year that if I wanted to call myself “fit” I probably needed to know how to swim. I’m not talking about floating from one side of the pool to the other to grab a beer – I’m speaking of actual freestyle swimming with correct breathing. My cousin and I started together and let me just say on the Dave Tate scale of shit->suck->good->great we were firmly at the bottom of the shit pile. I remember our first workout was to see how long it would take us to swim 200 yards and we both quit about 75 yards in due to near death experiences.

We quickly learned that if you couldn’t breath efficiently then you just couldn’t swim. It’s taken a while but I do feel like now I know how to swim. I’m not a competitive swimmer by any means but I can manage a 7 minute 400 yards. A big part of my improvement was just sticking with it even though I was awful. Being injured “helped” since swimming every day was about all I could do for several weeks.

Now, Mike has talked me into doing a sprint triathlon. I have no idea how this happened – I guess he just got to me in a moment of weakness. I think I’m actually worse on the bike than I ever was at swimming but at least I’ll survive. I have to admit that I’m kind of excited about trying something new. If you read Greg Glassman’s World Class Fitness in 100 Words you’ll see that “regularly learn and play new sports” is part of it. I enjoy grinding in the gym as much as the next person but what’s the point of being fit if you don’t get to express it outside of the gym? When was the last time you took on a new challenge? Try a Spartan race, go mountain biking, hiking, whatever.

You’ll likely find that all the ass-kicking you’ve been doing in the gym has made you better as just about everything in life. After all, that’s kind of the point…