Swimming 1000m

Image via Wikipedia

A gray autumn evening after a full day at home in front of a screen, cooking and doing other domestic chores. Well, may be time to stretch my legs and arms in the swimming pool. Let’s go and swim my kilometre. It’s not a long time since I started swimming this season, so 1000 metres is quite enough. So I get there after a quick five minutes walk, get changed, and after a few first breaths of the hot, humid and chlorine loaded atmosphere I jump to the water. It feels a bit cold at the beginning but that’s the way it has to be. While I swim I manage to disconnect and in one or another language, I start counting the distance I already covered and what I still  have left in all possible ways while in front of me I see the tiles in the bottom passing by. 1000m. That is 25 swimming pool lengths of 25m each, a possible way to count but I prefer to do it in fifties. Fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred… all the way at least to 800 before I take a short break or change from free to frog style. I try as well calculating the percentage I’ve already done. 10% for the first 100m, 25% for the first 250m and 2.5% for each swimming pool length. I mentally imagine a green dotted line as if I was downloading a file in my computer. I calculate as well the proportions. One tenth of the total after 100m, three quarters after 750m, or more detailed 17/40 for 425m…. before I realise I have almost finished. After that, 5 minutes in the jacuzzi, shower and back home for dinner. I am relaxed now.