here's a swimming update. for those who may not have been following along or don't care or can't remember, a brief re-cap. i spent three years trying to swim a mile (starting from not swimming at all). on december 12, 2010 i made it, swimming 2000 yards (a pool mile) in fifty-five minutes. upon reaching that milestone i set a new long, long, long-term goal of swimming those 2000 yards in under thirty minutes. in pursuit of this goal i plan on swimming 2000 yards once a week for the rest of my life. as a first sensible step towards the thirty minute mile i set out to get my time under fifty minutes. after a mere five months (!!!) of effort i made it last week with a time of 49:24.

a funny thing about the time is that i've been feeling stronger and faster each week. a few weeks back i felt so good while swimming i half expected to blow by the goal coming in at forty-seven or even forty-six minutes. on that swim it turned out i dropped two and a half minutes logging my worst time in weeks and ending at almost fifty-three minutes. then last week walking to the pool i felt terrible. i felt so fatigued and dull i almost turned and went home. i decided to go though the paces and assume a low time for the workout. instead of just limping through the forty laps it turns out i got my best time ever. as nike sagely and often suggests; just do it.

so i don't get called out again and have someone send me a chart, i thought i'd better go ahead and chart my progress ahead of time.

and if anyone besides me thinks me ever getting to a thirty minute mile sounds ludicrous, i figured out that if i can just improve my time by five seconds every month, i'll hit my mark by the spry age of sixty-two. if that sounds like a ridiculously long time away, i have an inkling we'll all be there before we know it.

also, the more accurate times starting in january are thanks to a super jazzy lap-counting watch i got for christmas.

next stop ... forty-five minutes.