What are your swimming goals for 2018?

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  • mke84mke84 Milwaukee, WIMember

    @mlamby - I looked into it and it seems like a nice event but I don't have anyone that could pilot for me, so it's a no-go. Lack of pilot really has been limiting my options - I need to convince some of my friends that kayaking is a good hobby to take up :)

  • JustSwimJustSwim Senior Member

    Point to LaPointe provides kayak support if needed. It is sold out so it would be not a 2018 option.
    The Apostle Island 20+ miles swim was canceled back in 2018 and not likely to come back.
    Swim to the Moon doesn't have personal kayakers officially. I find it a navigational nightmare. The nice thing is you can do a 2-fer that weekend. The Endless Summer 2 miles race is in Gary, IN on Saturday and Swim to the Moon is in Chelsea, MI on Sunday. Endless Summer is at a lovely beach and is was quite challenging last year because of the waves.

    MLambythelittlemerwookieIronMike
  • MLambyMLamby Senior Member

    mke84 said:
    @mlamby - I looked into it and it seems like a nice event but I don't have anyone that could pilot for me, so it's a no-go. Lack of pilot really has been limiting my options - I need to convince some of my friends that kayaking is a good hobby to take up :)

    I am having full knee replacement surgery tomorrow, so I am out of the water for at least a month. I'll pilot for you if you want to do it. I have a kayak and live 30 minutes from Lake Geneva. Let me know.

  • I'm getting into this halfway through the year. My goal is to train up for a triathlon relay race in March 2019 (I'm the swimmer on the team). I also want to get faster because at this point I'm so slow I'm embarrassed to post my speed lol.

  • mke84mke84 Milwaukee, WIMember

    @mlamby - I hope your knee replacement surgery goes well! Thanks for the generous offer to pilot, but after double checking my calendar see that I already scheduled something else for that weekend. Too bad! Thanks anyway though!

  • curlycurly Issaquah, WASenior Member

    I’m putting this in the goals for 2018 thread because it sort of relates, even though it’s so last year. I’m doing a little reflecting on the past year which didn’t exactly go as I had planned. Some of you may have even noticed that I haven’t been my usual chatty self as of late. As I think of my goals for 2019, it made me review 2018. News note: I don’t publicly publish my goals, so you won’t really hear all that from me. But I’m going to talk a little about 2018 and what I may or may not have learned.

    I launched into 2018 all bright eyed and bushy tailed after accomplishing everything I set out to do in 2017. So obviously, I set even higher and mightier goals for myself and started a vigorous training schedule to make sure I attained all my fabulous dreams. Training was going great with increasing yardage, decreasing times and overall generally great fitness. I was amazing myself and even the lifeguards were commenting on how well I was doing.

    I got into the lake earlier than I ever had previously. It was cold, but I wanted to keep pushing things and so I did. And then…. No, I didn’t injure myself, or anything like that… But one thing I failed to account for is that there are other people in the world besides me. And so, with a cascade, life decided to show me a thing or two about my plans.

    In mid June, my father died. It was not unexpected. He died five years to the day after my mother died, so it was kind of a nice end for him. My relationship with my father was one of those classic father son relationships. When we were young, we couldn’t stand each other. The older we got, the more we realized how much alike we were. And I’m really happy that he had so many admirable qualities. I hope that this is what he saw in me. His death in and of itself did not affect my swimming, but it played a role in my year as you will see.

    In late June, my beloved kayaker (who I also happen to be married to) decided that she wanted to go away with her girlfriends for a week or so. This was a few weeks before a 5K race that I had planned on being fastest of the old guys among other things. I did a write up of that dismal performance, but I forgot to mention my training during the time my beloved kayaker was abandoning me. I made an arrangement with another kayaker through a friend of mine. He is a rescue swimmer and a really nice guy. After he guided me directly into the side of an anchored boat, I decided that maybe he wasn’t the best kayaker. So the rest of my training swims were done solitary with a buoy, which I don’t really like doing. So of course, my swims were cut short and my training wasn’t quite where it should have been to be racing.

    During all of this, I had an additional weight that at the time didn’t seem like a weight, but I now realize that it had quite the effect on me. My long time friend and business partner was slowly dying. This had started a while ago, but over the summer it accelerated and by the end of the summer I was visiting him daily in assisted care and then hospice. I actually stopped swimming and didn’t really notice that I wasn’t swimming. He just seemed to need me more than swimming did. I can’t possibly explain how much he has helped me over the years. He was one of the kindest, honest and sincere people you could ever meet. His death was heartbreaking and I probably will never get completely over it.

    And somehow, you just got to soldier on.

    So the year that I was going to swim wonderful marathons and be fastest and bestest ended with me not doing any of the above. I lost two of the finest gentlemen that I have known and my beloved kayaker also turned out to have other things to do besides shepherding me around various lakes. I suppose that it is here that I should clearly state that my swimming performance in no way was affected by these other individuals. No. My performance was affected by me and my reactions to these events.

    And that’s where I get to the point of all this musing. What I did after I got back into the water was to just swim for the grace, the pleasure, the love of swimming. I swam as far and as fast as I felt like and I didn’t keep track of anything. No times. No distances. Some days I blasted and some days I floated. I kind of reconnected. It was really nice and now I’m starting to get back into the swim of things… Ha! Snort! OK, sorry. But that’s really what I’m doing.

    I like to think that life last year for me, had a lot of parallels to marathon swimming. It’s not a race, it’s a marathon. Things happen and you have to deal with them. Sooner or later we all are going to finish and maybe you shouldn’t be in such a hurry to get there. It’s not an individual sport. Everyone and everything affects you, it’s how you deal with it that determines whether you keep swimming or not. (Also, be nice to your crew. Dad taught me that one.)

    Happy New Year and I hope you all have great goals for 2019. I’m not going to tell you mine… Someone else can start the goals for 2019 thread.

    SwimUpStreamKatieBunIronMikeslknightStephenJaimieCopelj26
  • JaimieJaimie NYCMem​ber
    edited January 2019

    Oh @curly - so sad to hear that you had such a crap year with such devastating losses. I feel like in times like that just getting through the day and helping where you can is a much greater achievement than anything anyone could do, swimming wise. But I am glad 2018 that it's over now and hoping 2019 is much better.

    FWIW, I think it's a great idea to have a thread to reflect on the previous year as much as a forward looking one, I will try to remember this in December 2019 and hopefully we'll all have happy and wonderful things to report. xx

    swimrn62curlyCopelj26
  • molly1205molly1205 Lincoln, NebraskaSenior Member

    I'm very sorry for your losses, @curly, and thank you for so eloquently sharing your wise perspective. I lost my brother last fall to cancer, spent nearly 2 months out of the water after food surgery, and lost a little of my mojo, too. This is a "go with the flow" year for me. As you beautifully wrote: "Things happen and you have to deal with them. Sooner or later we all are going to finish and maybe you shouldn’t be in such a hurry to get there." The water is my happy place and I'm just gonna float.

    curly

    Molly Nance, Lincoln, Nebraska

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