You know what? No. I’m not going. I’m sitting right here, in this car, in this parking lot, at 6:47 in the morning, and I’m telling you right now, I am not getting out of this car. I am an adult; I have options. Options that don’t involve a changing room that smells questionable at best.

And for what? So I can spend forty-five minutes staring at a black line on the bottom of a pool while some inconsiderate “swimmer” does breaststroke, breaststroke, in the fast lane?

You know what this sport did to me. You know what triathlon did. It dangled swimming in front of me like I was the next Michael Phelps. Those first few months, man, I was dropping time every single week. Every session, something improved.

And then one day, one completely ordinary Tuesday, it just stopped. The clock stopped moving. I’ve been a 1:52 per hundred for what seems like forever. I swim two to three times a week, I do the drills, I bought the pull buoy, I watched the super clear YouTube videos, I even bought fins. And I am a 1:52 per hundred metre swimmer and apparently that is just who I am now as a person.

The bike doesn’t do this to me. The bike gives me feedback. I put in the work, the numbers go up, I feel it in my legs, I see it in my data. Running, same thing. Effort in, improvement out.

Watt I Learned. Apparently.

So I did some reading. Because apparently I can’t just be miserable about something without also having to research it at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night.

What I understand now, is that what I’ve been calling a motivation problem is apparently actually a technique problem. The plateau isn’t because I stopped trying (I really didn’t). It’s because I hit a ceiling that more laps alone can’t break through. There are things in my stroke that are costing me time on every single pull, compounding across every length, and I cannot see them from inside my own body. A proper swim coach will spot them easily. If that starts to happen again, I’m pretty sure my motivation will go up as well.

The big one with swimming, and what makes it very different from other endurance sports, is that technique is everything. Doing more does not equal going faster. Stop just showing up and swimming laps hoping something happens. Go in with a specific session, something to actually execute, a problem to solve. Because when it comes to swimming, apparently, grinding out meters with no structure is both the least effective training you can do and, in my case, the fastest way to make yourself hate the water.

None of this makes 6:47am in a car park feel like a reasonable life choice.