Yesterday was an hour's swim at the Rec Center, where heavily tattooed men hang out playing pool on the other side of the glass wall of the swimming pool area. I wouldn't know from personal experience, but I think of it as how swimming in a prison would feel. The pool is on the warm side and too shallow, so I scrape my knees on the bottom if I go too deep on a spin turn, and my spin turns aren't that great to begin with. A good workout though. I'm thinking hard about reaching and gliding, not just powering my way through the water. Itty bitty improvements each time.
I'm also reading some mental training material. At the library I got Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson - not bad, but very basketball-centered, obviously, and less good for individual sports. Then another one recommended by Jackson called Body Mind Mastery, written by a gymnast. I found it overly perky - possibly overly gymnast-y. The third one is called Thinking Body, Dancing Mind (or maybe vice versa), written by a Chinese athlete and an American marathoner. It's about maximizing performance using Tai Chi and Zen techniques, and I like it much better than the other two. It helps me to think about just letting myself swim, run, ski, etc., rather than forcing myself to go as hard as possible all the time. The 90% rule for example: you get maximum performance when you aren't tensing up, trying to get that last 10% of performance. Go for 90% and you'll stay relaxed and actually improve your overall performance.
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