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

On the 40th day of Jimby's continuous infirmity, his kindly swimming coach, Bill, took pity and made tonight's "stroke" practice reasonably doable.

• 8 x 100 odds stroke, evens IM on 1:40
• 12 x 25 fly with 3-5 SDKs on :30
• 12 x 25 back "
• 12 x 25 breast DPS
• 12 x 25 free 1 breath per length
• 3 x 100 IM on 2:00, last one fast
• 6 x 50 free on :40
• throw in the 100 easy I did on my own for pre-warm up, and it totalled 2700.

The only hard part was the butterflies, which seemed like they were going to be easy after the first one, but quickly became grueling five yards into the second one.



The horror and gasping struggle caught on camera by swimming and photographic legend, James Kegley, protegee of Doc Councilman, winner of innumerable Chesapeake Bay Swims, and husband of a former CIA operative

The set that did make me feel I still had hope as a swimmer was the 12 x 25 freestyles.

Almost everyone on our little team tonight ended up taking at least the allotted one breath and sometimes more than one.

I announced that I was going to alternate no breath/one breath, proclaiming to my teammates that my body had been so thoroughly colonized and replaced, cell by cell, by anaerobic bacteria over the past month and a half that I no longer needed air at all.

Mollie, Stacey, Annie, and perhaps to a lesser extent Jessie, that is to say, the comely young girls of the team, seemed to think this was the idle boasting of an ineffectual lech.



James S. "Renfield" Thornton frightening girls in his spare time

I actually thought perhaps this was a sound interpretation. But Spunky emerged, supplanting Renfield, and bragged to the comely tarts that the colonization is, indeed, so complete that I get lockjaw in every muscle of my body.

Thinking, of course, that this was true except for the one bodily quadrant that could actually use a wee bit of firmness.

Then the red thin line stood erect at the apex of the pace clock.

I was off.

No breaths the first 25.
None the second.
Or third.
And so forth.
300 yards without air.
Well, I breathed a bit in between, i.e., on the wall, while awaiting the next send off.

But nary a single lung suck taken in from toe push-off to fingertip wall touch.

It helped that our kindly Bobinator had posted earlier somewhere, I think, on her own blog, the quote from Alexander Popov about not fighting the water, but rather trying to assume some of water's qualities, befriend it, flow with it.

Actually, the exact quote was: "....you don't have to fight the water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move" Alexandr Popov



Popov's friendship with water leads to an odd fusion

And thus I imagined myself cruising up and down the pool like a human current, and the desire for air just faded away.

I have at last become a 6' 1" anaerobic bacterium: dream state complete.