Running with Jack

Last night my wife had a lot of school work to do for her English class so I decided to go practice my swimming. I have been wanting to check out the swimming pool in Blankenloch, a neighboring town that is only about half the distance away as the pool in the city of Karlsruhe where my class is on Friday nights. Blankenloch is also the town where the local Stutensee Triathlon is held every July.

Anyway it turns out that the Blankenloch swimming pool is only about half as long as the one in Karlsruhe, 25 meters as opposed to 50 meters. On the positive side there were also far less people at this pool, I was able to practice my swimming in a much more relaxed environment. During the first few laps I was really trying to concentrate on good form and it seemed like I was doing everything wrong and getting nowhere. Finally I took a short break and watched a couple people for a few minutes - they seemed to be so relaxed and cruised so effortlessly through the water. I recalled reading that one should think of how a dolphin or whale moves through the water. Now I don’t know about you, but I haven’t swam with any dolphins or whales, or even frogs for that matter, so I have had a hard time visualizing this. But as I sat at the edge of the pool watching a couple of these swimmers somehow it clicked. When I started out again with my laps somehow I find my rhythm and could get the arms and the feet on the right time-synch. After 10-15 more laps I could finally keep the rhythm going and start working on form.

This was a breakthrough of sorts, I just hope this side of my brain doesn’t go numb before my class on Friday night.

I eventually lost count of how many laps that I actually swam, but based on the time that I was in the pool I would guess I swam at least 800 meters last night. I think it helped a lot that the pool was not so crowded. We'll see!

So what't up with this "Jackqua Man" stuff? Actually this came from one of my bevloved blogging friends that coined the phrase "Jac-qua Man" after reading about one of my swimming adventures. Does anyone but me remember the old superhero "Aqua Man" cartoons? You young people can forget it :-), but maybe some of our more seasoned readers might have some vague recall - in any case I was a great fan of Aqua Man so I just can't resist using "Jackqua Man" when I talk about swimming.