A host of little things

Just came back from Indonesia, and it was quite fun. It's one of the few places where i can be a millionaire and i can still joke about losing 39000 bucks. It certainly helps, because i was unlucky enough to play daidee with zhizhi, a guy with moobs who was lucky enough to get all 4 2s and was thus declared automatic winner, making everyone pay him triple. I worship him man.

Anyway i just swam my 1500m for school nats today. And i saw real courage today. People who can't really swim were challenging themselves by taking on the 1500m. That category should include me, but miraculously i achieved a 7th position, so i shall exclude myself. The unfortunate thing about this event is that it has a maximum time of 25 minutes. At the end of it, the officials will kick you out due to time constraints, which is really cruel. So these people who couldn't really swim obviously couldn't finish it in 25 minutes. At first, the officials tried blowing a whistle, but did that work? NO! the people continued swimming, such was their strong desire to complete the race. So in the end the officials resorted to draconian tactics and lowered a flag line to block them. Quite sad. One of them had only two laps left. If there's one word to describe them, it's B-R-A-V-E.

Let me describe my way of swimming the 1500m. Firstly, don't do warm-up. You waste energy and you need all your energy for the actual race. Since it's 30 laps, you have the distance to do all the warm up you want. So the right strategy would be something like 10 laps warm up, 10 laps cruising and 10 laps warm down. Finish.

That would almost guarantee you last place unless you're some shen swimmer. Another tactic would be to go all out in the first 10 laps and then rely on willpower to see you through. Because as they say, where there's a will, there's a way. But that didn't work for me today, because the guy next to me lapped me 2 times. So did the guy next to him. and the guy next to him next to him. and that just kills willpower. But i still got 7th place. 2 points for the school. Cheers!