I swam a few years in high school. I never took swimming very seriously, and, as a result, I never became a great swimmer. My coach was more interested in building good people than good swimmers. As a result, we had an amazing record of 8 straight state championships in both boys and girls swimming. I wasn’t much of a swimmer, but I did manage to place at the state championships. After that, I didn’t swim again for many years.

It has been more than 15 years since I graduated from high school. I am quite strong, but also quite over-weight. At some point I decided that I was risking my health by sitting in front of a computer screen all day without getting any kind of exercise. That was about 10 months ago.

I signed up for a membership at Gold’s gym and have been lifting weights at lunch with my brother fairly regularly. I keep all my weight lifting records in a notebook that I carry with me from station to station while lifting. It is easy to look back and see the progress I have made.

I started swimming again about 6 months ago. At first I was going once or twice a week, but soon upgraded to 3 or 4 times per week. At one point I was swimming 6 days a week, riding my mountain bike to and from work, and lifting weights at lunch with my brother and a few friends from work. I finally started losing weight (after more than 4 months with little progress in that area), but it was too much for me.

I broke down and didn’t do anything for a good 2 weeks. I quickly realized that I need to exercise to feel good, so I’ve started swimming again. My wife is nice enough to come to the gym in the morning with me 3 times a week. She doesn’t enjoy swimming as much as I do, so she does a small workout on weights or a treadmill and then swims for 15 or 20 minutes as I finish up.

As fun as it is to look back on the progress I have made doing strength training, I thought it would be nice to be able to do the same thing with my swimming workouts. Of course, a notebook doesn’t hold up to water very well, so I decided to start a blog about it. We’ll see how it turns out.