Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas McConkey. Thank you so much for listening today. The topic today is old stroke, but that will not mean anything to you unless you're a swimmer.

I'm going to relate this to an element of mindfulness practice that's really important.

Starting with a little walk down my memory lane in high school. State champs, 1998.

Okay, it's enough of that.

There's a swimmer on the team.

I came onto the high school swim team.

I had no experience.

I didn't participate on the swim team growing up as a kid.

So I was just kind of learning the ropes my freshman year.

And there was this h of an upper classman,

Allstate swimmer named Joel. And this is not related to the podcast episode immediately,

but he had enormous pecks. And everybody knew him for not just his good looks and his kindness

to everybody, but his pecks. The guy could do over 100 push-ups just right

there on the spot, just drop down and give you 100 real quick. Anyway, Joel, as he was, you know,

teaching me about how one swims on the swim team, one day he was talking about holding stroke.

And he was saying, the difficulty in racing is that when we get

really tired, the muscles that hold the form that help us move the fastest and most efficient

through the water, they start to fatigue. And when they fatigue, the stroke falls apart,

disintegrates, it breaks down. So when we race, it's really important to notice where the

stroke is tending to fall apart, because in any race, whether it's, you know, 50 meters or

1,000 meters or whatever, at some point we're going to wear out. Certain muscles are going to fail

first, and that's going to create drag in the stroke.

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