Anchors and tugboats. One holds you back, and one pulls you forward.

Negativity can act like an anchor holding you back, narrowing your focus and restricting your potential.

By contrast, positivity acts like a tugboat pulling you forward. It's expansive. It opens us up to opportunity, gratitude or joy.

I heard this analogy from sports psychologist Justin Ross. It's a curious thing, he points out, that we don't actively learn how we should talk to ourselves; it just happens. If you're out running and things get tough, or if you're having a hard time at work or as a parent, our self-talk starts about how things are going and how we got here. But rarely do we consciously think about how we should talk to ourselves.

To get to positivity from a place of negativity, Justin says, the first step is awareness and noticing the negativity anchoring us down. Only then can we think about transforming the negative thoughts into positive ones and starting to feel the pull of the tugboat.

This example is sports psychology, but it applies throughout our lives.

Justin discusses this from 29:40 in the Löw Tide Boyz podcast episode 193.

Anchors and tugboats

Moon pools are protected entrances to water that can even give the remarkable ability to enter from under the water.

First created to support drilling operations on offshore platforms, moon pools can include entrances on the decks or undersides of ships or an entry and exit for divers from permanent underwater research bases.

For underwater entrances, also known as wet porches, the trick is to pressurize the air around the pool to the same pressure as the surrounding water. The raised pressure keeps the water from gushing in and enables a swimming pool-like entrance even though you’re already below the surface.

I've never used one, but I'd absolutely love to. One of my earliest memories of a moon pool and corresponding bafflement and wonder was in James Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss. A moon pool features in the recent trailer for the remastered version of The Abyss

Moon pool

Swimrun is basically navigating from start to finish through water and over land carrying only the gear you need. What you start with you have to finish with. You will run in your wetsuit and swim in your running shoes. The world championship courses are run by Ötillö. Ötillö means island-to-island in Swedish after the original course created from a drunken bet.

A beautiful aspect of it is that it's a team sport, both run and swum in pairs. Many choose to tether together which dramatically on the swims and keeps you both close.

In 2016 I teamed up with Rob Bell and took part in Ötillö’s UK swimrun in the Isles of Scilly. The Scilly event was a swimrun paradise. Check out the course, and the amazing event photos. The place is gorgeous, go visit sometime. And get into swimrun it’s awesome!

Swimrun

Unfortunately, a site I really respect, Swim Smooth, recommends avoiding glide, though I do think that a good 80% of the swimmers I see could do with extending the reach of and calming down their front crawl stroke at least some. Bottom line: not too much glide and avoid dead spots.

Swimming is awesome. It seems so simple, but there’s always so much to learn.  (disclosure: I’m surely an overglider)

Improve your front crawl

Couple of tips for front-crawl drills: twist your torso on each stroke, raise your elbow high and tight to the body, brush your ear with your hand as it passes.

Swimming sketches