Day 12: Mind games

Earlier this summer, when the bursitis in my left hip got so bad that it started radiating down my leg and into my back, I finally gave up and went to PT.  Where the physical therapist looked at me and said, "How would you feel if I told you no more walking or hiking for at least the rest of the summer?"

I gave him stink-eye.  And then listened to the nice man and agreed.

It propelled me to commit to going back to the pool, which is something I'd been thinking about for a while.  And here's where the mind games start.

First, it's the internal conversation:
You really like being in the water!
But it's cold.
Not after the first lap!
And early.
But then you're happy for the rest of the day!
It's cold.  And early.  And besides, where will I swim?  The Y is far away, and 24-Hour Fitness is expensive and the pool is indoors and there are weird dudes sitting in the jacuzzi watching you swim and The Wave only has lap hours three days a week in the summer before they close for the rest of the year.
So you can swim for the summer!
But I should swim all year.  (Pretends this argument isn't ridiculous)
(Looks up information about The Wave) Look!  It says they now do lap swim all year 'round!
But it's cold in the winter.
(Rolls eyes)

See?  There I am, pre-owning the fact that getting across the pool deck into the water (it's an outdoor pool) in the winter when it's dark and below 40 degrees outside (stop snickering, oh my East Coast and Midwest friends - it counts as cold when it's below 40 and you're wearing a small piece of Lycra and about to get into water) is really hard and I have trouble making myself do it, at a time when it's in the mid-60s in the morning, with plenty of sunlight.  This is how my mind stops me from getting up in the morning and getting my ass into the pool.

But two can play that game!

Once I'm in the pool, and have the first lap or two under my belt, I remember why I like swimming.  The fact is, though, that lap swimming can feel tough sometimes - back and forth, back and forth, again and again.  Sometimes the water is heavy, and it would be easy to think it's too hard to do however many laps I've told myself I'm going to do.  So I play games with my mind. I do all my laps in small sets - right now, it's in sets of five; soon, as I work up to my goal of doing 44 laps, it'll be sets of 4, which I find even easier to count.  Has anyone seen the TV show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?  I've only seen a few episodes, but there's a really funny one early on where she talks about how you can do anything if you count it in tens - it starts off easy at one and gets harder and harder, but then you make it to ten, and you're back to one and it's easy again! 

That sounds silly, but it's totally true.  So the first lap feels great.  Lap two, and I'm often thinking, I'm bored, this is hard, I can't do four more, I hate backstroke/freestyle/breaststroke/kicking/pulling/life in general.  But lap three, and I'm over the hump, and then four and five are downhill all the way.  And then I'm back to one!  It's amazing how much easier 30 laps are when you're doing them by fives.  I trick my mind every single time with that one.  I have it convinced that the only hard lap is lap two, and there are only six lap twos in the whole workout, right?  How hard can that be?  I have no idea how laps four and five feel like they're downhill, but they do.  (And, in honesty, so does the return length of a lap - I swear it's harder going out than it is coming back, for reals.)

Please tell me I'm not the only one who plays games with her mind?  Otherwise, it sounds kind of like I'm crazy...