Turning Up

So I made it back to the gym, woohoo. And I did a couple of days pounding the treadmill quite happily, managed 3.2 km in 30 minutes which when you think I could only do 2 minutes of running three weeks ago, isn't bad. Quite encouraging in fact. But obviously the little Pixies Of Doubt were rattled by my determination, and when I went for a swim today, they came out in force, dancing around me with their little wee pitchforks and signs saying "Give up, go home, have some cake." I almost got out of the pool after five minutes, so unusually grumbly and unimpressed by life was I.

Part of the reason was simple - I'd had a bad night's sleep, and I'm still exhausted now. Another part of the reason was that I had actually been quite fired up by the running thing, felt very proud of myself and the little twinkling lights saying I was not quite as unfit as I thought. I liked the high-tech feel of the gym (at least, I like it when it is saying good things like "3k." Not so much when it is telling me that I have run forever and only burnt enough calories to have half a digestive biscuit). It was a bit of a come-down to be back in the water, splashing around with not so much as a flashing display telling me I was still moving.

Plus I can get frightened in the water, which doesn't happen in the gym: I mean, in the gym I can wonder if I am going to live through the next five minutes, but if I decide not, I can always push a button and go down a level. In the pool, if I am doing freestyle - it only happens when I am doing freestyle, which is rather awkward considering it is the stroke I shall have to use if I do ever manage my open-sea swim - I can start to get panicky and disorientated. I wonder if I am going to stop breathing soon, or magically lose the use of my arms and drop to the bottom, or something else equally far-fetched. This is a nuisance, because it means that I lose my focus and want to stop. And it is particularly frustrating because now I am a leetle leetle bit fitter, I can physically do more than two lengths of freestyle at a time before wanting to gasp and puff my way into the spa pool immediately.
But psychologically, ridiculously, I struggle.

So today I ended up only doing forty lengths, but ten of them in a row were freestyle, and that was huge, really amazing, I'm astonished that I managed it. I could have flogged myself a little further, but I had a big meeting at school to get to, and I didn't want to be too tired for that. Oh, and I asked the lifeguard to show me how to do freestyle and it turned out I was doing it all wrong. So that was, erm, dispiriting. And then slightly less dispiriting when I did it his way and it worked.

Sometimes it's OK just to have an average workout. I'm not sure I completely won against the Pixies of Self-Doubt, but then sometimes you don't need to. Sometimes it's just enough to turn up.