Breathing in Water: Peer Gynt and Proprioception

L'heure bleue (blue gloaming or the photographers 'sweet hour'), seen from the back of a Tromsø bus.

It's ages since I blogged, though not so long since I swam, mercifully! No pictures to show for my indoor swims, not even with Sindre and the usual suspects in a pool apparently blessed by the most beautiful views (yep, I'd agree with that, although it was pitch black beyond the diving board!).

So today's theme is a butterfly exercise I've been practising all week in which you spiral forward by kicking your legs, smoothly turning as you do so, some 2 or 3 kicks each as you face up, sideways, down and round till you've done a length or ten. Whereas in most other sports we orientate ourselves according to the ground and gravity, in swimming we only have our own physiological feedback to go on, and a small bias in any one direction causes a cumulative deviation from the axis. I have no idea why this spiralling is so gratifying - probably because it exercises parts of the brain other mischief doesn't reach - but it has kept me happily turning round and round like a propellor on the central shaft of proprioception.

Which in turn reminds me of the current FB discussion with AC friends about Peer Gynt who, I insist, is not the feckless scoundrel he's made out to be. Or if he is, then I am too, for we share much in common: we both keep going round (whether ourselves or the world), we both attempt to stay true to ourselves as we do so, and we are both inveterate dreamers. Besides, how could anybody who elicits such beautiful music be all bad! (Performance of Grieg's Peer Gynt)