Fear Drives

Over the past week, I have been constantly amazed and impressed by the human body's ability to adapt, learn new tricks and be conditioned. I am a hopeless swimmer, a klutzy rider who slows down when vehicles whiz by, and an average so-so runner. By all natural accounts, I probably should not be taking part in races. But!

Fear drives. Fear inspires. Fear puts us in our right places and kicks us to get started. Take a deep breath, nail the fear, and go. Next comes repetitions. Reps give us the confidence to keep at it. The realization that we can, and let's try it again.

Let's talk about swimming first. I was seized with a fear of not being able to complete the swim distance. 2km?!? I could not comprehend why anyone would want to swim that far. (And the Olympics long-distance swim was a whopping 25km!) But swim I must. So I popped by Safra pool. Monday evenings were good, fewer swimmers and divers. I put on my gloves and jumped in. One thing led to another, one stroke after the other. I managed 20 laps with the gloves, in decent (to me) timing, abt 16min each set. Then I removed the gloves, and wow, arms could fly! I managed to maintain a per lap timing around 1:20min (more or less), and sustained another 20 laps in about 14ish-15min each set. Wow! More importantly, I had never thought that I could feel so comfortable in freestyle instead of breastroke. If someone did an aura map around the pool, surely he would have seen the bright glow radiating from that swimmer in pink cap. Haha.

Then I reached home. Fear of not being able to ride 90km on my new bike forced me to DIY and review every single measurement. I fixed my new bottle cage with new screws, and set up the bike trainer. For a non-technical person, I was pretty impressed with my mechanical skills. I tested many combinations and adjusted everything - from saddle angle, to pedal and brake tensions, to aero bar height, length, angles, dropping and adding stem spacers, moving elbow pads forward and back. Every new combination required hopping on and off the bike and testing some spins. Thankfully I had a reflective balcony door next to bike, and it was much easier to check the riding positions and leg angles. I spent an eternity fine tuning all the minute adjustments, even whipping out the measuring tape to be precise. But there! More than an hour later, I had a perfectly comfortable setup that I liked.