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!
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