March 15, 2017

The first sign that I’m starting to relax came this morning, when I woke up at nearly 6 in the morning after 10 hours of deep sleep.

My MAT and strength sessions with Ricardo and Rafa were enjoyable, with less muscle pain in both routines. The test of fire, however, was going to be the swim.

On a scale of 0 to 10, I had 9-level pain in my arms on Monday, and an overall discomfort in the water of 8. Yesterday it fell to 7 and 5, respectively. Today I was determined to get better numbers.

Today we had an extraordinary day, with the sun shining from the early morning on. People are saying that summer has come back; For my part, I only ask that the weather stays this way until my swim.

While yesterday the beach was empty, today there were all kinds of things going on. A group of young people from a high school practicing relays on the sand, more mothers and babies than I could count, and, in the water, a group of locals in paddleboarding classes.

After our warm-up routine I went into to the water with Nora. It was colder than yesterday—about 15° C, according to my calculations. We charted out a different route, adding about 500 meters to complete a full hour.

As the journey began, I was feeling normal. I finished the first half of the swim in 33 minutes, and with yesterday’s swim as a reference we assumed that we’d complete the hour as we arrived on the beach.

However, when I began the return leg I realized that we had a current in favor. My arms relaxed, and I decided to do an exercise that I’d talked about with Jaime Delgado, my mental trainer, but hadn’t practiced yet: swimming without losing my rhythm and concentration while mentally performing my meditation routine at the same time.

At first I had to walk back a few steps, but then all at once everything flowed. Going with the current in helped me get into the rhythm, and the concentration of the meditation routine made me forget the pains in the arms; very soon I was advancing comfortably.

We arrived at the beach and realized that we were still 6 minutes away from a full hour, so we swam away and came back to complete the time with 3,348 meters traveled. Even with the favorable current in favor on the return leg, it was a good result in terms of distance.

This by itself would have been an excellent result for the day. What excited me most, though, was being able to meditate while swimming, leaving me totally relaxed. I look forward to my day, sure now that it will be a successful and very enjoyable trip.

P.S. Today Paul debuted his drone. It survived both the wind and the discontent of the gulls. I hope you like the video.