Swimming

Today I did it. I swam 1 mile. Just seeing the number and the word makes it look pretty short. It doesn't look that far on a computer screen. I used to be able to run that far in 5 minutes (or less, for a short time). However, it took over an hour to swim it. I swam 72 lengths of the pool (I conveniently counted them in 2 groups of 12 sets of 3). It wasn't easy, but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. After all, I've been swimming 1/2 mile a couple of days a week, and sometimes I'll do some extra. I decided last week, however, that I would swim 1 mile today, and I did it. Now I'm sore and I'm tired, but I'm glad I did it.

I think there are some lessons to be learned here. One is certainly that when I set my mind to do something, I can do it; I do need to take the steps to get there, however. If you'd told me even a month ago that I could swim a mile, I'd have blown you off; I sink, remember? But when I started doing it, I found that I could do more than I thought!

Another lesson is that I need small goals. I don't focus on doing all 72 laps at once. OK, now 71 more. 2 down, only 70 to go... doesn't work all that well. But going at it thinking "I can do this set of 3" is a lot more manageable.

A third lesson is that I told someone last week that today I was going to try to swim a mile. I was pretty tired this morning and it would have been easy to skip (or, better, to just swim my usual 1/2 mile). But I told them I was going to swim a mile, so, darn it, I was going to swim it.

Now I'm going to get back to sermon writing.