Today I worked out in my old pool. I swam a timed 300 yard swim so I could compare it to my time last year. I wanted to see what 9 months of master’s swimming and total immersion drills has done for me.
Here’s the comparision:
April 5, 2005: 6:48
May 3, 2006: 5:20
That’s a 22% reduction in my time. 😀
That’s pretty darn good. I am finally feeling like I’m getting this swimming stuff after 9 months of persistence.
On a similar note, I was at a swim meet this weekend. (I swam 500 yards in 8:43.) A team mate of mine was talking about how he worked for 9 months to change his stroke technique and that it typically takes something like 100,000 strokes for a new technique to start to feel natural. This guy is a nationally ranked master’s swimmer, too, not just a slow poke like me. It made me feel much better to hear that it took him a long time to change his stroke.
Kaizen. Persistence.