Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

Preliminary notes:

I realize that some of our ranks like to make excuses for their swimming times, or perhaps to put this in more charitable terms, place some perspective on the factors that interfere with optimal performance.

Some, well, me, are not like this. We are the Clint Eastwoodian, John Waynesque type swimmers, who never apologize, never explain, just let our swimming do our talking for us. Often "our action does our talking for us" in this sense involves a Gatling gun and a wide open plain strewn with bloody corpses in Speedos, being pecked by vultures.

The excuse community, in the case of the recent YMCA meet I took part in, might well cite factors such as:

• insufferable air inside the dank pool chamber, air which allegedly triggered dozens of asthma attacks in youngsters the day before
• heat levels that are as close to an August day in Houston as you can find on a February day off I-80 in Western PA
• an ongoing deterioration of global financial markets that contributes so much stress to those individuals subject to pathological worry that it would be hard for me, I mean them, to breathe successfully from a ventilator in an ICU oxygen chamber, let alone unaided in the Gitmo of that fetid, fetid YMCA!
• the remains of a bubonic cold that, though abating, refuses to abate completely
• a stretched out speed suit that is so cheap they can barely give them away when new, and this one is not even close to new
• diving blocks that were so high off the water that nitrogen narcosis remains an ongoing concern during the breakout to the surface
• lanes that measured approximately 18 inches in width. not lane lines, but the actual lanes themselves
• the entire meet, which began with a 2025 yard warm up around 11, and finished not too terribly long after 2:30, with many of my, I mean the swimming person's, own events arranged 1-2-3 just like that!
• etc.

But I am not one to take refuge in even the most rational reasons for failure, and so I will leave all these above (and many, many other) excuses unremarked upon.

Thus, without any adieu whatsover, or ado, or whatever the correct term is, without any of it, here are my results from yesterday's meet at the Franklin YMCA (not far from Clarion, PA, for those of you who know our neck of the woods):

• 100 freestyle AGE GROUP: 55-591 JIM THORNTON 56 M SEWY 53.56

• 50 freestyle AGE GROUP: 55-591 JIM THORNTON 56 M SEWY 24.63

• 200 IM AGE GROUP: 55-591 JIM THORNTON 56 M SEWY 2:20.32 29.03 37.70 43.50 30.09

• 25 butterfly AGE GROUP: 55-591 JIM THORNTON 56 M SEWY 13.28

• 200 mixed freestyle relay AGE GROUP: 100-139 SEWY A 141 X SEWY 1:49.08 BILL WHITE 38M, MOLLIE NADLER 24F, BRANDI GEISENDORFER 23F, JIM THORNTON 56M23.44 27.94 32.69 25.01

Now I must leave to do tonight's practice:

• 10 x 100 on 1:25 warm up
• 5 x 200 on 2:30 (get average time)
• 4 x 200 on 3:00 (beat previous average)
• 5 x 100 on 1:20 (get average)
• 3 x 100 on 1:45 (beat average)
• 1 x 50 on :45 easy

total 3650

Possibly more commentary to come. I shall closely monitor the success or failure of this totally excuse-less swimming vlog to see if such fodder is what my blog-hungry audience craves, and if so, provide more of it; or if not, then quietly allow the hardcore swimming stuff to atrophy away, vlogging more about the subtler aspects of aquatic Jimnitude, which may or may not include the erotic death fantasies few readers have a taste for.