I got advice about aging well today. And some swimming stroke suggestions. And heard from a swim "influencer."

the stairs back up to the open air locker rooms. 

At Deep Eddy Pool. 

A cool, morning swim in a spring-fed pool, in the middle of "old" Austin, is a special treat. I head over to Deep Eddy on Mondays because my own swim club is closed on Mondays. They like to let the water "rest" but I hate to let the day go by without a swim so... Deep Eddy is my first destination at the start of the week. Especially a week peppered with heat advisories. 

There is one swimmer there who has swum just about every day of his life. He's married to a gold medal winning Olympian and has written a bunch of books about sports psychology. I know he's there when I walk down the long stairs to the pool because I can see his big, battery powered pace clock over on the side of the pool. Today I saw the swimmer but no pace clock. When he finished his workout I asked him what happened to the pace clock. 

He told me that he'd done a long swim for his 71st birthday and felt like taking it easy today; putting more emphasis on kicking and letting his shoulders rest. I asked him what he did for his long swim. 

He replied that he had turned 71 years old and it's his tradition to swim 100 yards X his age each year. Always on a tight interval. This year he swam 71 X 100 yards on an interval of one minute and thirty five seconds. That's one hundred yards in a 33.3 yard pool every minute and thirty five seconds! For you non-swimmers, that's fast. To make the swim team at top ranked Westlake High School you have to be able to do 10 X 100 yards on 1:30 in tryouts. And it's a pretty elite program. 

So, 7,100 yards in a bit less than 2 hours. Swimming. Freestyle. About four and a half miles. Swimming.

Those are tough times to hit for masters swimmers half this guy's age. Take the average 30 year old non-swimmer and make him try this and you'll probably be rushing someone to the E.R. It would be the equivalent of pulling a sedentary, overweight couch potato off the cushions and having him run a fast marathon. Not going to work out well. 

But our 71 year old knocked out the set AS A BIRTHDAY PRESENT TO HIMSELF and, at the end, pulled himself out of the pool, grabbed his swim bag and headed off to start the rest of his day. 

I asked him for advice on aging well. His response was to exercise hard every day. It's the discipline that makes it work. He has no health issues. No sore joints. No trouble sleeping. No muscle pains. He's engaged in his business and still writing books. He summed up his philosophy like this: "People get old because they give up." That's it. That's all. 

While I was swimming my yards this morning I shared a lane with a man who was faster than me. He finished his workout before me and was watching my freestyle stroke. He asked if I wanted a bit of advice. I said, "sure." He suggested that I try a higher elbow recovery on freestyle to take a bit of pressure off my shoulders. I tried it and it worked well.  I said something about getting older and wanting to save my shoulders from too much wear and tear. He asked me my age and I told him, "63." 

He chuckled a bit and told me that he had just turned 78. I asked him for advice about aging well (I thought, from his general appearance, that he was about my age....) and he just said, "Never give up. Never slow down." 

It was funny to hear all this after a spate of blogs recently from one of my favorite bloggers bemoaning his "advanced age." Turns out he is younger than me. 

My advice to people who think they are getting old? Surround yourself with the right people. Surround yourself with people who refuse to give up. Now, those are real "influencers." Add in some discipline and you'll do just fine.

Note the nice, high elbow recovery on the swim in the middle of the frame. 

Pool in the foreground. Lake in the background. 

So Austin.

Cap it off with a dose of Texas Sky.