Year 2007 is Over - Some Thoughts on Goals and Achievements

2007 has turned out to be a good year for me as far as middle age and swimming goes. I'm finding the goals I've set are achievable and have pushed me further than I really ever imagined. I was hoping to beat 500,000 meters and passed it early this Autumn. I started out doing 2100 meters per session and finished the year doing an average 3500 meters in a session which for me was unimaginable just a few short years ago. I finish the year with just over 369 miles under my belt (ok, swim suit string), in just under 250 swim days. Don't know what aging and time availability will bring in the coming years, but for now I feel I'm on the right track. These long-term goals are where it's at for me and I encourage all to try similar tactics. I'm making a lot of friends along the way. Happy New Year everyone! Here's to a wet and wild 2008!

No Horsing around on the pool deck!

Does Breaking the Routine Pay Off?

Unlike every other day this year, I changed my routine a little yesterday to try to achieve a distance goal for the end of the year. In my case, I added 20 percent to my distance. Wow, what a difference it made to my feeling of accomplishment, endorphin kick (it lasted all day long), and just plain physical feeling (pumped up). Generally one day has been the same as all the rest. This change really made me feel better. I'm a routine oriented person which is probably why I can swim laps day in and day out. I've worried about changing my routine because I've not wanted to create a reason to not workout. This small change which added about 15 minutes to my workout seems to have made a big change in my attitude. I'm wondering if other alterations may do the same?

Would you dare to do a flip turn?

Check out this pool with the glass wall overhanging the edge of a multi-story building. I think a simple flip turn might be ok, but the slam? Not!

Train in Snow

Something else I found on Digg.com. Nothing to do with swimming here, but check out the wave! Thanks maniacworld.com! I look like this when I'm swimming through still water ... ha ha.

Martin Strel Recognized Among Giants

What do Al Gore, Jacques Yves Cousteau, Prince Albert of Monocco and Sir Edmund Hillary have in common with swimmers? Martin Strel! The first three have been recipients of the Honour of Ekotopfilm in Slovakia - now adding Martin to the list.

But that's not all. Strel, famed swimmer of the Amazon, has joined the likes of several polar explorers, scientists and adventurers including world famous Sir Edmund Hillary in receiving Poland's Explorer Award.

I'm glad to see Martin's accomplishments are getting the world wide recognition they deserve.

A new way to post

This post will have nothing to do with swimming, but it will be about this blog for some future posts.

A year ago during Christmas of 2006, I received as a gift, Dragons NaturallySpeaking - the speech recognition software product. I was excited about it since I am a techie and installed it and tried it out right away. The computer I was using was a unit built in 2004 - a laptop. Needless to say the power was not quite what I expected was necessary to do speech recognition. But last week I purchased a 2.4 GHz dual core AMD unit with 3 GB of RAM. Now the speech recognition is flawless. Or nearly so. I'm hoping that this will allow me to do better posts at least posts that are more readable. Like the spoken word, because actually they are the spoken word.

For the record, the majority of this post was composed by spoken word. Cool huh?