Sunday, September 22, 2013

It was a bad(GOOD) day...

It was Sunday morning at 7:00 am.  No one was at the gym.  No one was in the pool.  In fact, most people were still warm in their beds.  But here I was, again, at the pool for the first workout of the day.  I was tired, and I had woken up with a sore throat, congestion and phlegm.  Things weren't looking promising.  And I had just put my goggles on.  It was, but many accounts, a bad day.

When you are training for an Ironman, you do not have the convenience of missing a workout.  They are all important.  And when you've been derailed as many times as I have, you show up to every training session.  So the question wasn't, "Should I do my swim today? but rather, "How can I get through this swim today?"  I started my swim and as I warmed up I tried to figure out how this could work.

The plan was 1500 meters, then 1000 meters and finally 500 meters.  A ladder workout, if you will.  And this isn't the hardest workout ever, but that day it might as well have been!  And then as I swam and was counting my meters and they seemed to be going so slowly, I had a thought.  When I really began swimming about 4 years ago, I could hardly do 500 meters, with breaks.  And here I was, getting closer and closer to my first set of 1500 meters.  I think I smiled in the pool.  And I felt proud.  I had come a long way since then.  I had grown, progressed, and become a good swimmer!  Can we ask for much more in life?

I didn't have the best swim that day.  And that's okay.  But every "bad" day is still an opportunity.  On that day I learned that even on the worst day, there is still a light if you seek to find it.  My swim was bad, but my outlook was the best it could have been.  Just keep swimming, just keep swimming!