Clear Margins

Still learning

26 October 2026

Glurpo the underwater clown

I got into swimming around fifteen years ago and it became a huge part of my life. I'm not competitive, I don't care about going fast, I just like to swim for a long time at a steady pace. It's kind of meditative for me, it's done wonders for my physical and mental health. Structuring my days around swimming has helped me make better choices, like drinking less alcohol and adopting more of a routine around eating.

It's not an exaggeration to say that my life pretty much revolves around swimming. When I had my consultation for cancer surgery, the first question I asked was when I'd be able to swim afterwards. If I go for a few days without a swim I start to have swimming related stress dreams – I'm trying to get a swim somewhere and I can't for some fantastical reason, that kind of thing.

Me swimming off the coast of Cabo Verde

When we go on a beach holiday, our days are built around sea swims. Breakfast : a swim : lunch : another swim : siesta : dinner : bedtime. My partner is not as fanatical about swimming as I am, but he enjoys it enough to tolerate this nonsense for my sake.

A map of a swim I did on holiday

I'm a big fan of Terry Laughlin's work. He developed the Total Immersion swimming technique. One of my favourite things he said was that humans being so inefficient in water is great because it gives us near endless capacity for improvement, lol.

Last year I set myself a swimming goal I wanted to track in a way that my smartwatch wouldn't support, so to my frustration I ended up logging my swims manually in a spreadsheet. At first this seemed like a ridiculous waste of time, but a few months in I realised I was getting something unexpected out of it..

I watched an interview with Terry where he talked about taking copious notes when he got out of the water each day. I realised I was inadvertently practicing reflection, a tactic used to support effective learning. I decided to double down on the reflection part and added a notes column to my spreadsheet – this year the notes column was my goal (I still have the distance calculations in there of course, I just don't look at them so frequently 🙈).

My swimming spreadsheet data in a chart

Over the last wee while a series of annoying, compounding (but hopefully temporary) health issues have reduced my swimming massively. If I don't get in the water tomorrow I'll have gone an unthinkable two weeks without a swim. 😱

In my first post on this blog I talked about how I wanted to practice being a learner throughout whatever happened to me with my cancer treatment. Before he passed away, Terry shared openly about how he'd adapted his swims to his own advancing cancer.

Today instead of focusing on how demoralised I am from my lack of swims, it occurred to me I should still add a record to my spreadsheet. A zero kilometre swim with just the reflection on how I'm feeling about it. So I did that!

I soon realised I'd also need to adjust my tracking algorithm because it logs any entry as a swim, so it needs tweaked to count only non-zero metre entries. 🤣

Not being able to have an experience I can't experience right now is of course a daft thing to attach myself to. I'm still learning how to learn.