The 2022 swimming season finishes

Excuse the poor selfie: this was an attempt to capture myself in my dressing gown next to the pool, prior to my entering it for the final swim of the year. 

In 3½ months of visiting the pool, apparently I have swum 567 lengths, or just over 14 km. I thought that after a shaky start, I swam 20 lengths every Friday and Saturday, but it seems that I didn't do so in June and some of July. I swim at a pace of about 1 length per minute, but the entire process lasts just over an hour (walking to the pool, swimming, resting, walking home then showering). So I'll have two more hours a week at my disposal.

With all this swimming and also walking (almost every day over 10,000 steps, which is about 8.5 km), one would think that my weight has decreased. Somehow, since the first of June, my weight has ballooned from 81.8 kg to 85.1 kg! That is not very encouraging.

Last week was the vernal equinox and the Jewish New Year; the nights have been getting longer and cooler. Despite this, the days have been very hot, reaching 35-37°C at midday. Something else has changed as well: along with the heat, I've started having headaches that range from the mild to the annoying - minor migraines. The first time I was taken unaware and had a miserable day; since then I've taken two half pills, but I'd prefer not to have to take anything at all.

I'll close off  this portion of the blog with a long quote from the book "Blue mind":

But there’s much more to the experience of swimming than buoyancy. Water has a tangible quality, a weight, and it has 600 times the resistance of air. Unlike earth or air, we can explore water in multiple dimensions — up, down, sideways; as neurologist Oliver Sacks comments, we feel tangibly supported and embraced by this “thick, transparent medium.” The resistance and pressure of water contribute to swimming’s role as one of the best forms of both aerobic exercise and muscle toning. Because the pressure of water outside the body is greater than the pressure inside, explains Bruce E. Becker, director of the National Aquatics and Sports Medicine Institute at Washington State University, water forces blood away from the extremities and toward the heart and lungs. The heart responds by upping its effort, pushing this extra volume of blood more efficiently with each heartbeat, and thus circulating upwards of 30 percent more blood volume than normal throughout the body. To cope with this increased load, the arterial blood vessels relax and create less resistance to blood flow. 

Here’s the intriguing part: one of the hormones that regulates arterial function is catecholamine, and catecholamines are part of the body’s response to stress. As Becker describes it, “During immersion, the body sends out a signal to alter the balance of catecholamines in a manner that is similar to the balance found during relaxation or meditation.” In other words, just being in the water can create a feeling of relaxation and a decrease in stress.  

But that’s not all. The lungs are receiving a greater volume of blood as well, which, combined with the pressure that water exerts on the chest wall, makes them work harder to breathe — approximately 60 percent harder than on land. This means that aquatic exercise can strengthen the respiratory muscles and improve their efficiency. In one study that compared aquatic aerobics with “dry” aerobics, Becker discovered that while various forms of aerobics improved fitness levels and some respiratory capacity, only aquatic exercise improved respiratory endurance. The muscles, too, are benefiting from the increased circulation as they receive greater amounts of blood and oxygen. And it’s a good thing, too, because it requires effort to propel the body through water; in swimming, every muscle is benefiting from what is essentially resistance training (one of the best ways to increase both tone and strength). In addition, swimming works the large, smooth muscles of the body, stretching and lengthening the muscles, joints, and ligaments with each stroke, while the head and spine get a good workout with every breath you take. It all means that stroking through the water not only puts you into a psychologically relaxed state, but also makes you physically stronger.  

Like other forms of aerobic exercise, swimming can produce the release of endorphins and endocannabinoids  (the brain’s natural cannabis-like substances), which reduce the brain’s response to stress and anxiety. Some theorize that the feel-good effects of swimming are related to the same “relaxation response” triggered by activities like hatha yoga. In swimming, the muscles are constantly stretching and relaxing in a rhythmic manner, and this movement is accompanied by deep, rhythmic breathing, all of which help to put swimmers into a quasi-meditative state.

(Nichols, Wallace J., "Blue Mind: How Water Makes You Happier, More Connected and Better at What You Do" (pp. 108-110). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition. )

I don't know about that quasi-meditative state. I do know that I find it easier to swim when I am thinking about anything but swimming; for example, last week I was working out the algorithm for improving the correlation calculations, and the lengths went by swiftly. But the day before, ironically I was thinking about perseverance and how it applies to swimming; I had slight problems in maintaining rhythm. I have overcome this in the past via the use of headphones, but I have become very dissatisfied with them: when I manage to get them to work, my ears get blocked so I can't hear anything anyway.

There appears to be a solution for this: one day, I was talking with a swimmer older than I, and I could hear something emanating from around his head. He explained that he gets very bored when swimming (aha! I'm not the only one) and so he found headphones that work by bone conduction. After walking home, showering and decompressing, I went looking for such headphones on the Internet and ordered a pair. Obviously they were not going to arrive in time for this year's swimming, but I'll have them for next year. They'll also be useful when walking the dog in rainy weather: I should be easily able to fit those headphone on my head then put on a woolly cap and possibly a waterproof-cover.

As Wikipedia puts it, Bone conduction is the conduction of sound to the inner ear primarily through the bones of the skull, allowing the hearer to perceive audio content without blocking the ear canal. Bone conduction transmission occurs constantly as sound waves vibrate bone, specifically the bones in the skull, although it is hard for the average individual to distinguish sound being conveyed through the bone as opposed to the sound being conveyed through the air via the ear canal. Intentional transmission of sound through bone can be used with individuals with normal hearing — as with bone-conduction headphones — or as a treatment option for certain types of hearing impairment. Bone generally conveys lower-frequency sounds better than higher frequency sounds. 

I didn't know about the frequency filter until reading this now; this is a bit disappointing but I suppose that it's not that important in the long run. I wonder whether I should listen to songs with vocals or instrumentals; I think that songs will help me keep more focused on the music and less on the swimming, which is the whole point. 8 GB storage is huge! I calculate that I swam for about 9½ hours for the entire period this year, which means that fully loading the storage will cause no song will repeat. I'll write more about this once the headphones arrive and I start using them. Ironically, the wiki article doesn't mention the possibility of using bone conduction headphones when swimming.