Mark Collier

The Hills Outdoor Pool

I’ve received a lot of good advice over the years, from many trusted friends and family.  In some cases, you hear the same exact thing from many trusted friends and so you really know it’s true.  It usually only takes me somewhere between 5 and 10 years to take such good advice, though I suspect the cycle is trending towards the latter as I get older.

Some people might even call this stubborn behavior, but I like to think of it as “mulling it over until I think it’s my idea.”

Which brings me to my latest passion:  swimming.  I’ve had a bad back for several years, after throwing it out in a tragic accident at a friend’s Oscar party several years ago (I’ll save you the gory details, but suffice it to say there was a heroic lunge involved toward a treacherously placed tub full of icy cold beverages – a risk every athlete takes).  Apparently, as I’ve been told by dozens of friends and family, swimming is “real good for ya”.

So a few weeks ago I started swimming at my gym – the hills (a fantastic gym in westlake / Austin, TX).  Here are a few of the surprisingly awesome things about getting in shape by swimming (aside from the old “good for your joints and bad back” wisdom so often cited):

1)    It takes about 5 whole minutes to be completely exhausted when you’re out of shape.  I could spend 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer and not be this tired!  This might sound depressing, but on the contrary I can leave my house, swim, shower up, and be back home in under 1 hour!

2)  Motivation:  Unlike traditional excercises at the gym, if you give up whilst swimming you will actually die.  This is a nice motivation and it seems to kick in automatically.

3)  Muscles:  This one totally took me by surprise, but I have found that I’m getting a lot stronger after only a few weeks of swimming.  I guess when you’re flailing like a 200 lb fail wail whale, you really get quite a work out.  I’ve actually started doing push ups when I can’t go to the gym just to keep up the upper body workout.  This is totally not like me.

I will be booking my trip to Beijing now.

So, in summary, if you value your time on earth and thus would like to get on to the business of doing-smart-things up to 10 years sooner:  listen to your mother.