Learning to Fly
As with all things I got myself into it. I volunteered to swim for Garmin in the Kansas City Corporate Challenge, or as I call it, the “Nerd Olympics”. Traditionally, Garmin does very well in the corporate challenge until the swim meet, which I feel has something to do with the fact that we have fitness products for all athletes except swimmers (I’ve even modeled for one of them). When Jen emailed back the schedule, I had been demarked to swim the 50 backstoke, as I had last year. I noticed that they didn’t have anyone signed up for the 100 individual medley in my age group, so I volunteered. The next thing I knew they had signed me up for the 50 freestyle, 50 backstroke, and the 50 butterfly.
I don’t know how to swim butterfly. Traditionally triathletes make terrible sprinters as they swim 50o meters to 1 mile in a race, not 50 meters. Plus in a triathlon anything besides freestyle is pretty much a waste of time. I figured in the 100 IM I could fake something for 25 meters. Every time I tried to learn butterfly ended with lots of flailing and sinking. Now I had two weeks to see if I could learn something that could pass.
I of course went the first place one goes to learn something new – Google. I was able to see what it’s supposed to look like, which was helpful.
So it was off to the pool for almost every day the week before. The big lesson I learned was, to paraphrase Yoda, “For Butterfly, try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” If you try to do butterfly in any way except the correct way, you will experience something known as “sinking”. I also learned that butterfly uses muscles I really didn’t know I had before. And they get really mad at you when you start using them.
I wish I could say this had a happy ending, but that wouldn’t be real life. The day of the race I had a 100 degree fever, but there wasn’t anyone to substitute and I had to swim anyhow. In the 50 butterfly my goggles rolled off my eyes as I hit the water, and I lost momentum coming off the other wall and sort of waddled into the finish. I came in third to last.
On the upside, all my studying did help me in the 100 IM. I think I look pretty good.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Is that you switching the 305 from wrist to handlebars then hopping on the bike? Damn! You looked just like ‘The Flash’ you were so sporty and fast. I’m glad you didn’t drown.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:02 am
I’m the slacker that had too much life going on, forcing Nick to swim all my events. I’m glad he was able to take up my slack and not die doing butterfly (always my one and only goal when I do that hateful stroke).
Still it sucks that we were not BOTH able to swim all those events, because as usual Garmin got slaughtered in the swim meet due to piss-poor participation. (The main difference is that this year we were already staring at most of the other teams’ asses before the meet, instead of legitimately challenging for second or third and then falling to the middle of the pack after the meet, as we usually have.) Next year! (raising fist to heavens a la Kirk in Star Trek II)