After nearly 19 years at Alstom/GE/Andritz it is time for me to say goodbye. On Wednesday I start a new journey with GypTech.
Category Archives: Life
So much for Christmas wishes…
So 2023 could not have started off any worse, for me at leaset.
Christmas workouts seemed to be on track with me getting back to full strength in the water, but around the 3rd of January I started to have breathing problems. I assumed it was connected to my back and chest pain. I managed to swim about 25-30 minutes the 8th to the 15th, but on the 17th I January the pain was too much for me so I contacted a Doctor. After a few phone calls and a few visits at various clinics I was released from the Emergency room around 0200 on the 18th with a diagnos of Pneumonia. So 8 days with antibiotics I started to feel better. But I was still coughing up blood.
With an planned trip to India on the 30th I was given an inhaler that would help open up my lungs and reduce the coughing. It worked I was able to travel with minimal coughing.
This week I picked up a blood pressure testing device and started my investigation into high blood pressure. I was able to swim about 1400m both Tuesday and Wednesday. I am hoping to get in at least 1000m tonight. but the combination of the lingering cough/breathing issues and now this thing with my blood pressure I am starting to think i will not get much swimming done in February.
My new ambition for 2023 is to be OW ready by May.
All I want for Christmas is…
to be healthy in 2023.
For the second fall (autumn) in a row I have had to struggle with injuries. In 2021 it was my shoulder that could not keep up with the amount of swimming I had done from September 2019 until August 2021. It took 7 months to get back to “normal” and I was able to swim all summer, jippee!
I managed to race twice in August, on long race and one short race. Things were looking up for 2023. Then I fell of my bike, broke my the top of my Ulna (elbow) in September. Back to rehab, focus on getting mobility back in my left arm. After ten weeks of rehab and starting to try to swim my right elbow started to acted up. It turns out that I neglected my right elbow during my rehab so much that I got tennis elbow.
This meant no Club Championships for me, this means no Swedish Nationals in March 2023 for me, and it means that I will have to struggle all winter to be able to get back into shape for OW season.
All I want for Christmas this year is a healthy body so I can practice again. I am so out of shape, I get easily irritated (more than usual) and there is a risk that I fall into a bad routine that will be really hard for me to break.
Vidösternsimmet – The Viking Tattoo edition
It has been well over a year since I swam the first Viking edition of Vidösternsimmet, 42km. I knew from before I finished the race that I would want a tattoo if I managed to finish. I have two from my Ironman races, and swimming 42km is up their with Ironman challenge status.
When the starting list for The Viking came out they organizers used a viking ship to indicate which swimmers would be doing the 42+km swim.
<br><code><!--more--></code><br>I was not about to get a boat tattoo, so I started to search for Viking symbols, and found a Viking compass that would have made for an interesting tattoo. It would be a good represenation of an OW race since navigation is key to good OW swimming and the Viking symbols a link to a race called the Viking Edition.
Luckily for me the race organizers came out with their own new logo, and created a really cool finisher medal based on that logo. Due to Covid, a shoulder injury and lack of motivation I never got around to getting a commemorative tattoo in 2021. I finally booked a time and last week I finally got my Viking swim tattoo.
It took over an hours, but we started with the logo for the race, then looked at the finisher medal. My original thought was to go with the sword and snake image with a text 42+km. After talking with the tattoo artist (danielart.tattoo), and looking at what he could do with a photo of the medal, we decided to use the full medal as the tattoo.
The only change to the medal design was that we took the 42+km text from the backside of the medal and placed in in the water to the left of the snake where my name was inscribed.
Once the tattoo has healed I will add a new photo of that below.
My Latest Tattoo
I know that my mom finds it funny that I can handle getting a tattoo since I have a hard time getting shots or sitting in a dentist chair. But I had been planning on getting a new tattoo after last summers Viking Swim that never happened and during the fall I decided to get something else. So last Monday (the 1st of March) I got my 10th and 11th tattoo. Only ten are still visible since my nineth tattoo covered up my third.
Inspired by Kevin Costner in the movie “Water World” as well as all the other sci-fi movies I have watched in the last 46 years, I decided that I wanted to have gills. I figured that I swim enough, that it would make sense to my friends that know how much I swim and it would be something that I find interesting. If nothing else, it would be a conversation starter. After alot of searching on the internet for images of gills and people with tattoos of gills I decided on shark gills. Then it was a question of where to put them. I am personally not fond of having visible tattoos when I am at work, so behind the ears or on the neck were not going to be an option for me. So under my arms or on my ribs seemed like the most logical location close to the lungs and a large area to work with.
Continue reading 1,000,000m Swimming and Covid-19
I found it interesting that I did not write about this, but based on my OW season totals I thought I would be able to pass 1,000,000m swimming around the 20th of Sept. But getting sick on Sept 1st did not help. I eventually surpassed the 1 million meter mark on Sept 30th.
Continue reading Rough start to May
My first business trip since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. I knew that I would eventually have to travel again, and I has 100% aware that it was not going to be easy from being at home for the past five months working out on average 12 hours a week to nothing for upwards of six days. But having the last 3 trips cancelled or postponed I was kind of hoping that this one would be push up too.
Due to the limited access to public transportation and the roughly 1300km distance I had to travel to get to site, I wound up traveling by car for nearly 13 hours on Sunday the 3rd of May with two colleagues headed in the same direction. Everything in the town I was visiting had shortened hours. Most things closed between 1600 and 1800 daily. This limited my options for food and the hotel we stayed at had no fitness room.
Week 7 – “halfway” thru Feb
It’s a leap year, which means and extra training this month, and we’re just over halfway thru February. It’s been three weeks with with two hour Sunday swimming and I’m starting to feel the effects of my long training weeks. My shoulders are sore and swimming doesn’t feel as good on Sunday’s as it does during the week.
Swimming, swimming and more swimming
Swimming, swimming and more swimming. If you have been reading my bloggs lately you might have gotten the impression that all I do is swim. But in fact swimming is only half of what I try to do these days.
1 Million Meter – January update
As you know I took on the 1,000,000 m Challenge 2020, or 1000 km, or in Swedish a 100 mil.
It was a rough start to the year with a slow start to the swim year with less than 10km the first week, but with Thursday night’s medley workout and Friday the 31st solo swim I finally swam past the pace holder.
SwimRykno 