prayer swimming, perhaps?

Ok, as i have blogged about before, i have become rather accustomed to prayer biking (along the lines of prayer walking, except that i do it alone, and hence silently - not that i'd have the breath to pray aloud while cycling anyway). Well, today i didn't have anything to do before a meeting at school in the evening, so i looked into the sky, observed the unthreatening white clouds, and decided it would be a perfect time to go for a swim (especially in the light of my sudden recent compulsion to exercise)

So i decided to go down to the Katong pool before the meeting, as though i could swim for free at school, where i'd be heading to eventually anyway for the meeting, given the sheer amount of time i'll be spending there over the next few days during matric fair (while it's still the holidays, i mean - when school starts, bo pian mah...), i thought that i didn't want to spend any more time there than was necessary.

Then before i started to swim, suddenly this bright idea popped into my head (you know where i'm headed...) to pray while swimming... So i thought to myself that it wouldn't hurt to try it out, so i did... To rather little success, though...

The main reason behind this is that i can't really think about much else when swimming, for some strange reason, apart from telling myself to head for the other end of the pool. Maybe the sound of the water relaxes my brain and dulls the brain cells... I dunno... Also, i find breathing while swimming to be very distracting to the thought processes. So i'd be thinking of something and praying for it in my head, then i'd have to take a breath, and once my head was in the water again, i'd forget what i was praying for... Of course, this whole situation was hardly aided by the fact that there were several pesky children having swimming lessons in the main pool, all of them never bothering (actually can't blame them lah, still so young...) to look out for other swimmers trying desperately to span the length of the pool, whose way they were constantly impeding. The coaches also did nothing to stop the children from impeding our way. After having faced this situation many a time, however, i have now become rather adept at changing directions midway while swimming so as to siam the approaching children... This of course, also requires some thought processes, and hence also hinders proper and effective prayer...

So, to cut a long story short, i think that the whole concept of prayer swimming is quite inachievable for me... But on the upside, however, i did manage to complete 24 laps today, which is a new personal record (which actually isn't saying much at all, since most of the time i end up just lazing around at the side of the pool rather than actually swimming per se). Yay, that's 1.2 km (though if you include the added distance owing to having to change direction en route, i think i must have swam at least 1.25, if not 1.3 km today...). Additionally, i did find that (probably resulting from the same factors that caused prayer swimming to be ineffective) swimming today helped to clear my mind of many unecessary thoughts that were cluttering my mind =). So all in all, it was a good and refreshing time... Now the next task that awaits is to try to run twice today's distance (i.e. 2.4 km) and see if at least an ippt pass is within my grasp...

On a totally unrelated note, i forgot about the time after the meeting ended and subsequently missed my first ever episode of Lost... Bummer... Oh well, they'll be stranded on the island for a long time to come anyway... =P