22 October 2009

Counting down the laps

I've mentioned before that I have to lie to myself and play mind-games to get myself through my laps. I'll tell myself I'm only doing 28 today, and then say, how about 4 more at that point and then say, well, darn, it's only 8 more, I'll just do 4 and then right at the end say OK, the last 4 are easy, might as well just finish the thing off. And a lot of valuable energy is wasted in figuring out ways that I'm going to finish what I started.

Then the idea of the pool abacus was born. A visual representation of how much I'd done and how much was left. Let me explain:



You see those blue things? Not only do they keep the lane line floating but they move. You can slide them up and down the wire as you see fit. So, once I complete my first 50, I casually flip one forward, continuing to do this until I've completed 10 sets of 50, then I reverse direction, pushing them one by one back towards the middle of the pool until none are touching the wall. I am then done.

This way I can easily see that I'm halfway done and there is an immense sense of satisfaction when I reverse direction. I also satisfy some OCD tendencies by having a routine every time I get to the wall. And most importantly I can tell when my deceitful mind games confused myself so badly that I'm pretending I did laps that I didn't. 40 laps means 40 laps thanks to my new abacus.

7 comments:

  1. O DockerOctober 22, 2009 at 5:33 PM

    I was told there would be no math on this blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LisieMernOctober 22, 2009 at 8:08 PM

    I was trying to formulate just the right comment then O Docker's made me spew red wine on my laptop. Perfect.

    ReplyDelete
  3. EVK4October 22, 2009 at 9:16 PM

    LisieMern,
    O Docker is a professional commenter who has many thousands of destroyed keyboards to his credit. He actually paints a little keyboard on his topsides (that's boat talk) for every funny comment he leaves.

    O Docker, soon we will get into stroke counts and I think that may require the quadratic equation to understand. Get out the old PSAT primer books, that should help.

    ReplyDelete
  4. TillermanOctober 23, 2009 at 6:00 AM

    I think you're on to something. I sometimes lose track of the count when I'm working out too. Maybe I could rig up some kind of abacus on the bar of my barbells? But how would I move the rings without putting the weights down?

    ReplyDelete
  5. EVK4October 23, 2009 at 11:29 AM

    tillerman, can't you just use the "plates" (or whatever they call them)? Slide them over after each lift?

    ReplyDelete
  6. TillermanOctober 25, 2009 at 1:47 PM

    Thanks for the advice O Superblogger Superexaminer Superdad. I will try it and let you know gow I get on.

    ReplyDelete
  7. SwimCoachToolsOctober 27, 2009 at 9:04 AM

    Have you ever tried doing a set instead of straight swimming laps? Sets can make things a lot more interesting.

    ReplyDelete

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