Friday, April 24, 2009

Like Poetry in Motion

It has been a few weeks of stress for me. Life has been really busy building my prototype for my device. For weeks, I slept late, and woke up early. Finally, last week, I have deployed my prototype, and it was working about 70% of the time. Anyhow, it was good enough to retrieve the data required for my paper. But today I won't be talking about my silly inventions, I will blog about my embedded sensor device much later. 
Today, I'll be talking about swimming. After all that hard work, I decided to revitalise myself with some swimming and running. Unfortunately, the second day I went to the pool, I lost my goggles. The next day I went swimming without goggles, I thought it was no big deal. After all, it's just water. However, after the swim, my eyes was blood shot red. The chlorine in the pool water made my eyes very dry and irritated. It felt like I had sand in my eyes. Driving home was difficult cause my eyes was watery and it is as if I was crying. If a police had stopped me then, he would be wondering why is this grown up man crying like a baby. But it was really bad, and I had to wash my eyes with clean unclorinated water for a while to get rid of the dryness in my eyes.
So the next day, before going swimming, I went to Aurora outlet stores to get some new goggles. I know I've seen Nike outlet store selling pretty cool looking goggles. I tried a few goggles and I decided to get the competition style goggles.
No, I'm not trying to be Michael Phelps, but I would like to eventually be as fit and good looking as he is. I would definitely skip his habit on smoking pot though. 
What I got was the Nike Remora M goggles. It fits well and has a nice metallic shade.  The goggles look and feel like sunglasses when you wear it. Of course it was a bit dark, but its not like I'm out to check out babes at the pool :p. 
The high content of chlorine also made my hair very dry. My friend Paul who goes swimming with me, told me that I should wear a swimming cap. I didn't want to get one at first since I see no point of wasting money that way. But Paul convinced me that if I didn't wear one, I would risk losing hair. What did he say, "I can lose hair". Noway, I don't want to add the risk to my thinning hair, so I was convinced to get a swimming cap. I got a gray cap to match my goggles. 
I couldn't wait to try out my new gear in the water. I even tested it at home, just to check out how it feels. It felt great, and I can't wait to try it out. So the next day, I was ready to brave the waters again. It was amazing what good goggles can do to improve your swimming. I was able to do 8 laps none stop with the new goggles, and the cap just adds some aerodynamics that help me glide on the water like poetry in motion. I never had to stop to get the water out of my goggles. There was no leaking and I was almost swimming like a pro. Almost that is, my style was a bit off, but I'm happy at my performance so far. Hope to improve more as I get to practice more comfortably with all these new swimming gears.

3 comments:

  1. Kinda eerie. Wearing swimming cap while "surfing" online.

    Literally, "surfing" online will not cause your eye strained with chlorine, except long hours of staring at monitor!

    LoL :=p

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  2. Probably you can try swimming across Lake Michigan when you go up there for your testing. You got all the gear ready.

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  3. mnajem: :)

    Ayoi: That's the whole idea. For now, my prototype was deployed in a lake near by. We are waiting for the next funding to deploy it in Lake Michigan. When the money is there, I'll be swimming in Lake Michigan.

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