Make 5% your 100%

Hi friend,

last Saturday, we swam.

20 kilometers through the Danube, under 20 of Vienna’s bridges, with my friend Johannes. And then the messages (mails, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook...) started coming in.

Swimmers and especially people who do not swim, who have never called themselves swimmers, wrote to tell me they got in the water that day too. A lake near them. A pool. The sea. They saw us go... ähmm... swim, and they went. Because of them, NF got heard. Radio. Newspaper. Even the evening news. More people know the word Neurofibromatosis today than knew it a week ago, and that was the whole point.

We had people from all over the world swimming to raise awareness. You can see the whole map here.

Thank you to everyone for being part of it. To say it in Johannes words:

Segmentation

Every long crossing I finish, I finish in pieces. The method has a name: segmentation. In plain words: one lap at a time.

When the finish is too far to see, or in a race where there is no set finish at all, you shrink the distance until the next mark is close enough to reach. You reach it. Then you move the mark, and reach it again.

A runner named Mark Dowdle just showed the extreme version of this. He won the Last Soul Ultra, a backyard ultra in Germany: a 6.7km aka 4.17 mile loop, run once an hour, every hour, until only one person is left standing. He lasted 94 loops. Almost four days. Around 630 kilometers.

He did not run 94 laps. He ran one lap, 94 times.

That is the whole method in a single line.

It is like driving at night. Your headlights reach maybe 60 meters ahead. But you can drive the whole way across the country in the dark, 60 meters at a time. You never see the entire road at once. You only ever need to see the next stretch.

That is exactly how I cross a lake. I swim from one feeding to the next. A few hundred strokes, then food, then the next few hundred. That is how the whole lake gets crossed. One segment at a time.

The next lap is your 5%. The part that is actually yours. So you pour everything into it, and let the rest of the water wait its turn.

This week’s experiment: the next lap, and nothing else.

Take the one big thing you have been circling. The project, the goal, the change you keep pushing to next month. Define only the next segment. The next 60 meters of road. Do just that one. The whole thing can wait.

See how far one lap at a time gets you by next Saturday.

Two weeks from now on September 12th, I get in for Lake Lucerne. I will swim it the only way I know how: to the next feeding, then the next, one lap at a time, until Switzerland runs out of lake.

You cannot always see the far shore. You can always see the next 60 meters. Drive there. Then drive there again. Or in my case swim there and swim again ;-)

See you

Bernhard

P.S. The swim put NF in the news for a day. You can keep it going all week. Tell one person what Neurofibromatosis is. That is how a rare disease stops being invisible.

P.P.S. Hit reply and tell me your next lap. Only the next one. I read every reply.

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