I did 12 laps at the pool tonight, a clear improvement on last week. I even managed two lengths without stopping. I think the most I did last year was 18, so I’m returning to that fairly quickly. Nice to have some things that you don’t forget how to do.
I stayed up too late last night and read the last Sherlock Holmes / Cthulhu crossover by James Lovegrove. I’m surprised how much I’ve read so far this year: four Joe Abercrombie books, three James Lovegrove, Dune, a book about 2000AD comics and more besides. And I have my mound of books from Christmas to start on too. At this rate I’ll have read more books than I did in the whole of last year soon. Although there were a lot of books about Space Marines…
I took the Lovegrove back to the library and my girls asked me what it was about, and I tried to explain, and they laughed at me. Admittedly, Cthulhu is a part bat part octopus part fat bloke, another of the villains is an enormous head on a stick, Nyarlathotep is a man with a ten foot tentacle instead of a head, there’s big birds called byakee, mounds of slime called shoggoth, and hounds that look like invisible things that don’t look like dogs, so in daylight these things definitely aren’t scary. Or my children are defiant in the face of cosmic horror. Good on em.
3 responses to “Swimming and not-terrifying horror”
Swimming’s going well. Hope you have got to the point where it is relaxing? I also like the fact that you don’t forget how to swim. I haven’t been climbing for over 12 months now, so getting back to that will be interesting.
It hasn’t been relaxing yet – I’m hoping when I get to the point that I’m not gasping for breath after every 25m, that will come (or maybe I should be doing backstroke again, because that always seemed just ‘right’ in a way that other strokes don’t…
Any absence of 12 months or more can be ‘interesting’. The key things are whether your expectations have decreased more than your abilities or not. The worst times I’ve had have been when I go back to running after a long break, and can’t do the things I could do before. Those times where it’s been long enough that I’m forced to be realistic about my limitations have been much less frustrating than when I jump back into it and find that I’m several years older and more inept than I remember. Similar, I guess, for climbing. I just have to keep repeating ‘top half like a monkey, bottom half like a ballerina’ to myself
Top half = sadly flabbier arms than 12 months ago. Good tip though.