Hi there,
This week I got an urgent message from one of my swimmers. She was spiraling about the unseasonably cool temperatures that could affect her upcoming race. What if it’s colder than expected? What if I can’t handle it?
I know the feeling. Before swimming the length of Loch Ness I refused to get in the water before the swim start. I was afraid that if I did, I would psych myself out about the temperature. So when she told me she was going to get in a neighbor’s pool to build her cold tolerance, I sent her a voice message: Don’t take the temperature. The number is just a number. The water gets to feel however it wants to feel — and you get to feel however you’re going to feel on that day, regardless of the number.
What I was really asking her to do was stop determining her threshold before having an actual experience. Fixating on the temperature feels like preparation. But it’s actually a way of avoiding the real question — what will this feel like in my body, and can I trust myself to respond?
Then I walked into a swim lesson with a five year old who looked me squarely in the eyes and said: I don’t want to get in.
No negotiation. No apology. No number to hide behind. Just the clearest possible signal from a body that knew exactly what it felt. While he’s most likely testing, he’s also closer to the truth than most adults I coach.
Somewhere along the way we learn to stop feeling directly and start measuring instead. The temperature. The pace. The distance. The data stands in for the experience until we’ve lost contact with the thing itself — the water on your skin, the engine of your body, the information arriving stroke by stroke.
I’m guilty too: I just got back from the Yucatán Peninsula, where I traveled to swim the Mayan Channel. As soon as I could, I snuck a peek at the wind forecast and checked the weather. Every few days, I’d check again; taking the temperature in every sense of the word. But then, the swim didn’t happen. Not because of the weather. Because of a permit issue with the port authority — something I could never have measured.
On the morning we were to depart, I slipped into the water one last time. Later, on the ferry, the tears came. And what came up wasn’t about numbers at all. It was about what I wanted to find out. What it would feel like to cross. What the current and the winds would tell me about myself that I couldn’t know from the pool or a training swim.
The thing I teach, I had to relearn on a ferry crossing the channel I wouldn’t swim.
Don’t take the temperature. Feel the water. That’s how you find your way back — into your body, into direct contact with your experience, back to what the five year old still knows how to do.
I suspect I’ll be back for the channel. On its terms, when the conditions align.
I’d love to know — where in your swimming are you taking the temperature instead of feeling the water? What number are you hiding behind? Hit reply. I read every one.
Swimming alongside you,
Shannon
