Musings on Meets and Goals

Finally, I feel like I am into my summer cycle. With the Geezer gone and the Senior Olympics past, I am now training for long-term goals. Maybe I should rephrase that. I am now training for A long-term goal: the National Senior Olympics. No, we haven't come to a firm decision yet, but my guess is yes. Yes, we will go, and I will be in the pool with some real swimmers. Not to be embarrassed there, I will have to get a lot faster. I may be pretty good on the state level, but the national level is a different thing. The sprints are out. I have no chance there. The backstroke is out. I am not that good at it. My best events are the 200 and the 500 free. Actually, I am thinking about focusing on the 200. Although the 500 is my best, the longer distance gives a better swimmer more time to put distance between himself and me. In the 200, I can only be beaten so badly.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that I am just trying to lower expectations. But the fact is, there are levels to any athletic competition, to any sport. Me thinking that I could go to Nationals now and be competitive is like a pretty good high school football player thinking he can jump to the NFL. It does not work like that. At that level, most of those guys and gals are former collegiate swimmers. I did not swim in college. I did not swim in high school. I did not swim in jr. high. In fact, I am an adult-onset swimmer. If I could compete against other adult-onset swimmers my age, I have no doubt that I could compete against not only the best in the nation but the best in the world also. 

I started this post with the plan to write about Monday's and Tuesday's training. But it has morphed into a reflection on the level jump between state and national competitions. I have done more than reflect over the past week. I opened a notebook and began to write plans and programs to get me there. I even calculated how many strokes I take in the 200 free. I take 168 total strokes or 84 strokes per hand. My lifting has already changed beginning this week. Exercise selection has changed, and numbers are now a huge part of what I am doing. Nuff said about that.

Back to my notebook. I wrote out a series of goals and some steps to achieve those goals. I will add to the notebook from time to time. And I will read the notebook from time to time. I always do that on big stuff. I had a notebook for the Geezer Run. One thing in my notebook was that I needed another year to train for it. I did not take the extra year, and as a result I had to switch to a bicycle to finish it. There are several reasons I decided to do the Geezer in 2021 instead of 2022. I won't go into those right now. The point I am making, however, is that there is something really powerful about thinking through an athletic goal and taking pen to paper and writing down the goal and the steps to get there. It gives purpose, structure, and motivation to training. Already I feel that motivation. What will I do today? How will it move me towards my goal?

Life is good with goals. Thank you, Jesus.