40 days in the Wilderness

The dictionary defines a binge as "a period or bout, usually brief, of excessive indulgence; a spree," and that pretty much sums up my relationship with the water over recent years, no calm or considered gradual committment or consistent approach to swimming just huge periods of inactivity followed by little bursts of training. This year for example, I managed to swim every day in the month of February, and almost twice a day for a fortnight at the end of August, these two bouts of activity amounted to 48 sessions in a 6 week period and for the other 46 weeks of the year I didn't even manage one swim a week.

Now as readers of my Swimming Times column will know I always arrive at this point in the year resolving that next year I'll make the transformation from Binge Swimmer to Consistent swimmer, but somehow family and professional committments always conspire to stop this and when the going gets tough..... well it's the swimming that suffers.

I've been thinking of ways to make a sustained committment to swimming in 2011 and I've been spurred on by the fact that today I've been out of the water for 40 days, and following the festive pig out I was forced to dig out my size 16 jeans. However the clincher was that to my horror I caught myself sitting in front of the TV watching re runs of Dynasty.....  therefore I decided to take some advice from a rather unlikely source; the Stranglers who preached "Something better change" all those years ago..

Now how do I maintain discipline over the next year, well most motivational speakers reckon that you should write down your aims and ambitions because it makes them more tangible. What better then to write this down in the form of a Blog and to use it as a motivational tool to see how I do this year, I can then fail spectacularly publicly.

In setting my aquatic challenges for the year I have been especially inspired by the heroics of my fellow swimclubbers on the training diary thread and particularly the esteemed Katie Bun who announced on Facebook this week that she'd managed 501,000 metres in 2010; now allowing for holidays etc that's about 10,000m per week or around 4 hours a week and it seems to me to be eminently do-able (is that a word?).

So half a million metres is the quest and my short term goal is to swim twice a week during January and to swim every day in February, keep checking in to follow my progress and I'll write my sessions up and comment on my progress or lack thereof.