I’m planning to go swimming in a few hours. And I feel paralysed. What by? It’s not like I’m going to drown. Sure, it’ll be about as dignified and fluid as fighting sentient porridge – I’ve not swum in just shy of two months, since Ironman Wales, but I like to think with three Iron-distance races under my belt, I should have assumed that most basic level of competency by now.

I think I’m sat here, writing and wasting time, because I recognise it’s a beginning. The plan was to start on Monday. The plan is to start on Monday. Six four week blocks, with a week in the middle to bugger off to Portugal with Embrace Sports and spend a week doing so focused sharpening.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been working slowly on building myself up, so I can start this season in a better shape than I started last; Keeping up the cycling to work a few times a week, with the odd longer ride thrown in. Tiding over the runner with the odd Parkrun spectacular, one or two cross country explosions (this weekend should be fun), and trying to make it back to Goodgym a little bit more on the regular. Sculpting my badonkadonk as Isokinetic in the hopes I’ll look damn fine in jeans (and maybe, just maybe, my body will be less prone to falling apart at the first sign of distress). But none, nil, zero, zilch, absolutely no swimming.

Actually, this isn’t a beginning; this is the end of a beginning; one of last pieces of the engine to start turning again before the machine springs to life. I need to spend Friday setting up my online food shops so I can stop eating day-to-day crap. Then I need to blast through a hectic weekend: cross country, wedding, race directing, post-wedding pubbing, collapsing on the sofa in a blubbering mess and wondering why life is such pain and where the hell the paracetamol have got to. Then all eyes on Lanzarote.

The idea came to me to write this down as I was thinking on why I’m so built up for this short splash. I have written about how last year sucked, was hard, and how I’ve been making some changes in the hope that 2018 is a better, healthier season for me. But I never resolved to make any changes to the blogging, which was a bit painful through 2017.

I’m going to change it, pretty much on a whim. Doing whatever exercise has felt good to me has worked well in the last couple of months, so why not extend that to writing? I think I might try throwing a set schedule out of the window, and stop insisting that everything I publish is at or around 2000 words. They both take a lot of mental energy and I think I could maybe save that for better uses. Also, I like my more spontaneous words. See also last post. I’m not linking it a second time.

Yeah, so, 2018 (the 2018 season, ie about to begin; consider this the first post) is going to be the blogging year of spontaneous short posts, whenever I feel like, about whatever I feel like. I think that might work better. Well, we’ll see. It’ll be an interesting experiment.

Listening to: Envy – Scene, and trying to make the English translation fit to the Japanese lyrics (they don’t)
Reading: 5 Ways To Feel More Positive by Performance In Mind, and laughing at number 5 and still not being in the pool yet

Will update when I’ve not drowned