Swimming is by far my weakest leg in triathlon. I’m a very slow swimmer even in a pool, but my problems are compounded in open-water, where I have great difficulty spotting the next buoy until it is within about ten yards of me. Of course, I try to take note of other landmarks that may be more visible than the buoys, but particularly in a lake swim, one tall tree on the shore of the lake looks almost undistinguishable from the next one to me. Generally, I’m forced to resort to following other swimmers through the water, hoping that they know where they are going.
Last summer, I made great improvements in my pool swim and swam my fastest continuous mile, finally breaking the 1:00/50yd barrier. Shortly thereafter, at the mile-long Deer Lake Swim near Panama City (FL), I had another miserably poor finish. I managed to keep up with other swimmers for about half the course, but then became separated, after which I could not determine where the next turn buoy was. As it turned out, I had overshot the turn, swimming perhaps an extra two-tenths of a mile.
I think that in addition to overall swim fitness, open-water swimming requires a strong ability to grasp visual details at a glance. I try to sneak a peek as I breathe, then find myself uncertain as to just what I saw. Eventually, I am obliged to stop and tread water as I look around and try to get reoriented; obviously, that results in horrendously slow swim times. There’s a website called “Are you Smarter than a Chimp” (http://games.lumosity.com/chimp.html)
where you can test your ability to grasp and remember visual patterns at a glance. My partner is one of those few who test smarter than the chimp, so it’s no surprise that he comes out of the water far ahead of me and I don’t catch back up with him until halfway through the bike leg.
About two weeks ago, I started a thread
(http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...ersonality_Self-Test_
P2203088/) about a test I developed to determine whether your world-view is based on the Primacy of Existence (POE) or the Primacy of Consciousness (POC). Metaphorically speaking, POE-oriented people look directly to the buoys of life and navigate toward them, while POC-oriented people are content to follow the other swimmers. In extreme cases, the POC-oriented person may deny the existence of buoys altogether, or may claim that the buoys are only “imaginary” or “subjective,” of may insist that “each of us has his or her own buoy” and “it may not be your buoy, but it is my buoy.” Alternatively, he may insist, as a couple of posters did in that thread, that he’s not sure whether the word “buoy” should refer to that theoretical orange float or to the eyes of the various swimmers.
Of course, the great danger in following other swimmers is that they may not know where they are going either. The next swimmer is only reliable if he/she can see either the buoy, or else he/she can see another swimmer who can see either the buoy, or … (ad buoyum). The other drawback, as I discovered in Panama City, is that when no pattern can be discerned from spotting other swimmers, a POC-oriented person is lost in the middle of the lake.
I don’t mean to imply that open-water swimming is an exact metaphor for POE vs. POC. For example, I am a POE-oriented person, yet in open water I tend to follow the other swimmers. That’s because for me seeing the buoy simply doesn’t seem to be an option, so I resort to the only alternative.
In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave (from The Republic), he depicts a group of people who are chained in a cave, who can see “reality”–that is, the things passing in front of the cave’s entrance–only hazily and indirectly, via shadows on a wall of the cave. Only the philosopher, who is not bound by the chains, can view this “reality” directly. As the allegory is usually interpreted, the chained people represent the vast majority of us, who are of limited vision, and only the philosopher-king, with his special insight, is fit to rule us. Small wonder that through the ages Plato has provided the model, not only for mystics who believed themselves endowed with unique insight, but also for technocrats and totalitarians who believed that they themselves knew what was good for the common people better than the people could know for themselves.
As Plato might have viewed open-water swimming, the buoys are visible only to those with specially tinted goggles, while the rest of us are forced to wear foggy goggles through which we can only occasionally catch a hazy glimpse of the buoys.
Is insight accessible only to a chosen few, as Plato believed, or can it be acquired by the majority of us? Personally, I believe that insight is learnable. Truth and reality are not hidden from us, but it takes an active mental process to learn to see them. That process may take longer for some than for others, but no one is gifted with special goggles. IOW, insight can be acquired, if you’re only willing to work on it.
With that in mind, I purchased Insight in December and have been working with it regularly since then. Insight (http://www.positscience.com/...rtex/description.php) is a “brain training” product designed to improve one’s “visual processing and memory.” It’s one of the few products in this area that seems to have some experimental validation. (Has anyone else here tried this or a similar product?) Several of the exercises involve the same kind of split-second perception that is required for efficient open-water navigation. I’ve worked through about a third of the program so far. Based on early assessments built into the program, I’m making rapid progress, but the true test will be in open water. I may not end up smarter than the chimp, but if I can learn to spot that orange thingy at a glance–well, let’s just say that in at least one past race it could easily have made the difference between second and first in my AG.
