Two years or so ago, I went to the doctor. I’d like to come up with something poetic to say about why, but it was pretty simple.
I felt like shit.
Naturally, I surmised that years of medical school, training, and real life experience treating thousands of patients would help Doctor Sharma to come up with a good path forward for me. I wanted to feel better, and I wanted to do what it took to feel better.
Dr. Sharma listened to me patiently, and promptly order a “comprehensive” blood panel. We were going to get to the bottom of it! They drew what seemed like an infinite number of vials of my blood and sent them off to a lab for analysis.
Weeks later, the results were in. I dutifully went to my follow up appointment, ready to finally find out what was “wrong” so I could fix it.
Dr. Sharma looked at my chart dispassionately.
“You’re low in vitamin D, I’ll prescribe you a high dose of Vitamin D”.
“That’s it?” I asked, incredulously.
“That’s it, you’re fine, maybe you should work out more.” she demurred.
“I work out five times a week, are you saying I should do six?” I stammered. She looked confused.
“Maybe you should eat some more vegetables” she added.
When we go to make decisions, we’re always weighing subjective and objective factors. In my case, the subjective was easy: I felt like shit. So I went in search of data to explain why. I didn’t get any kind of explanation in that moment.
Another way of looking at what I did was to look to confirm what I already thought. After all, I felt pretty sure of how I felt, and no data was really going to tell me otherwise. It’s not an entirely wrong approach to take, but it is important to think about, what will you do when the data doesn’t match your subjective take of what is going on.
Lately, when I swim by myself, I’ve renegotiated my relationship with the most important “data” collection anyone does in a swimming pool. At either end of where I swim, a red glowing LED all-knowing entity known as a “pace clock” tells me how I’m doing.
Much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character from “The Terminator”, it has the following characteristics:
It can’t be bargained with
It can’t be reasoned with
It doesn’t feel pity, remorse or fear
And it absolutely will not stop.
It just ticks on. Sometimes it tells me what I want to hear, that I’m doing well. Sometimes it doesn’t. There are moments when I push off and feel as if I’m floating on a wondrous cloud. Then the clock brings me back down to earth: just another rep that’s roughly the same as all the other reps you usually do.
So as I previewed, I’ve renegotiated. I don’t dutifully pray to the LED god every time my hand touches the wall. Most of the time, I give the clock no heed. Go ahead and ask me how it feels.
IT FEELS GREAT.
What I’ve realized is that at any given time you can only focus on so much. I was giving a lot of my attention over to processing how fast each repetition I was doing was. What that meant was that I had scant attention left over for everything else I was trying to accomplish every time I pushed off a wall.
So I’ve found more brain power to consider how I’m swimming, where my limbs are at any given time, and how my body is actually moving from one end to the other. I’m having fun trying things that I would have otherwise dismissed as they were likely, in the short term, to earn me a quick reprimand from the pace clock.
Every so often, I still do a “spot” check for quality. I make a quick apology to the clock, ask it to remind me of what time it is, and push off. Then I look again whenever I’m done.
What I’ve found, consistently is that I’m going much faster than I think. Checking in on my “data” less often has allowed me to actually make progress, in real quantifiable terms, faster than if I was constantly checking.
I get my blood drawn every six months now. A few days later, I have several pages of data to pour over with my new doctor. I didn’t accept the first opinion to “work out more” and take a ridiculous amount of Vitamin D. So I have someone else guiding me on how to square the numbers I have on the page with my subjective account of how I actually feel.
Swimming is a sport where all roads tend to lead to a quantifiable outcome. We’re almost all striving for times on the clock. That can lead us to reduce and simplify. If the clock is what we want to improve, let’s do as much measuring with the clock as possible.
The clock, despite my jokes, is not all-knowing. If you cut yourself off from the subjective experience of being in the water, feeling immersed in that foreign environment, then you’re missing out on half of what you need to make effective decisions on what to do next.
That becomes even more crucial as I swim by myself and have to attempt to “coach” myself. The ideal set up is to have someone else who can constantly help you synthesize your subjective experience and data (clock and otherwise) into gradual improvement of decision making.
Now, I shudder already at the response of anyone reading this and jumping to the conclusion that I believe everyone should shut the clocks off and run practice with no “data”. Don’t mess with success, baby! That’s my motto, but maybe, just maybe, reconsider whether devoting as much attention as you have to that ticking mess is actually the best way to improve the way you swim.