One of my favorite things every summer is to swim in our beautiful river Aare. Typical male, I can’t just enjoy it and shut up about it. No, I have to turn it into some sort of an achievement. And then brag about it on the internet. Which I am about to do. But, with a twist, I hope.
A few years ago I started to turn my summer river swimming routine into an imaginary competition (mostly against myself), trying to beat my swimming record each successive year. Using maps I determined the distances of my various swim routes, then started to count how many times I swam them and to keep track of all this information on a spreadsheet.
Last year (2017) had been an extraordinary year for swimming, the river was warm enough early on and until late in the year. The water level was high, due to some repairs at a power plant nearby. So at the start of this swimming season (2018) I was doubtful, if I could reach the same distance as last year (634 km). I decided to try anyway and pushed myself harder to swim the longer route, the one near my house (1.8 km), at an even lower temperature (15º from last years 15.5º). By mid July I realized that it was going to be a close call, but I kept at it. August turned out to be a great month for the conditions, with very warm weather but with a still decent water level. People are still swimming in the river in mid September. Of course this is speculative, but it seems to me, that all things considered, I probably could have beaten the previous record quite easy this year. If I had not injured myself (while swimming!) early August.
Because of the injury however I had to cut back. At times I even stopped swimming for several days, hoping that it would help me recover – to no avail. So I decided to change my plan. Instead of going for the record I decided to do a geeky math challenge, I tried to swim each of my various swimming routes in a different binary numbers (1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 etc.). And that’s what I ended up doing. The total was exactly 500 km again, which is almost incredible. This occurred without me planing for it, exactly like it did two years ago, in 2016.
So I am done this year, my swimming season 2018 is officially over.
(All the swims from now on will be off the record ;))
Sadly, I have to admit that swimming so much these past few seasons has started to make it slightly boring. Going for quantity instead of quality is just wrong, especially when it comes to your favorite past time. For me swimming in our glorious river counts almost as the equivalent of going to church (especially since I am an atheist), but certainly it is a form of meditation or contemplation. On my swims I hope to delve into nature, to find some quiet, enjoy some space, the sights, the sounds, nature and to observe the animals.
Unfortunately most of the rest of humanity does not seem to agree with my approach. As a result the other peoples swimming behavior has gotten increasingly irritating, most people are loud, reckless, irreverent. There are more and more people in their rubber rafts, playing loud music, dropping their trash everywhere. It is really quite frustrating. The best swims are usually early, when the river just wakes up, or late, when things quiet down again.
My actual highlights this season again had to do with observing the animals while sneaking past them in silence. Like in previous years I was able to spot many birds and foxes. But this year was all about the beaver. Twice I almost bumped into one as it was just lounging there in the river. Mostly early morning or late at night I was able to spot them near one of their dams. Once we saw one very close to our house where it was knocking down some trees or something. I started to really love this animal with their anarchic grumpiness, building wild structures and wreaking havoc. These past few weeks I also was able to take some photos of the beavers while taking walks (see bellow).
