0122 Smoking impairs vital capacity

"Senior!"
"Senior Chen Jue!"
"Wake up!"

Chen Jue felt someone calling him and blinked his eyes open, dazed. He realized it was Ma Qiang, accompanied by a few other students from the swim team.

"Are you all right, Senior?"
"It's already dark outside! You’ll catch a cold sleeping here," Ma Qiang kindly reminded him.

Chen Jue was startled. He propped himself up groggily and looked through the floor-to-ceiling glass of the swimming center. Sure enough, the bright daylight outside had vanished, replaced by the pitch-black of night.

"Dark? Did I really sleep that long?" Chen Jue was surprised. He felt a jolt of alarm and hurriedly took out his phone to check the time. He remembered it being just before 4:00 PM when he walked out of the locker room; he hadn't expected to have slept until after 6:00 PM.

This state of extreme exhaustion was truly something else. It was the first time he had trained to the point of passing out. However, after that two-hour deep sleep, he felt his stamina had recovered slightly. He opened his interface:

——————
【Name: Chen Jue】
【Strength: 1.68↓ (-0.05)】
【Physique: 1.97↓ (-0.06)】
【Spirit: 1.27↓ (-0.02)】
【Skills: Omitted】
【Available Free Attribute Points: 0.04】
(Character Evaluation: Omitted)
(Warning: You are in a state of high fatigue. Your bodily functions are at a low point; exercising in this state will significantly increase your risk of injury.)
——————

"It dropped from 'Extreme' to 'High'?"
"So fatigue is categorized into levels?" Chen Jue muttered to himself, guessing this was a hidden feature from the last interface update.

Beyond that, he noticed the red downward numbers next to his three basic attributes had decreased slightly compared to before his nap, though they hadn't fully disappeared. Clearly, those two hours of deep sleep had provided excellent self-healing.

He stood up from the electric massage chair and stretched, finding his entire body aching intensely. It was much more tiring than his previous limit-breaking runs, and the side effects were more severe.

Ma Qiang chuckled as he watched. "Senior Chen Jue, it’s because this is your first time training like this! The energy consumption of a high-intensity swim team workout is several times higher than aerobic exercises like running."

Chen Jue nodded in agreement, as his previous routine training had never left him so exhausted that he fell asleep on the spot.

"Don't you guys get tired doing this every day?" Chen Jue asked subconsciously, noticing that Ma Qiang and the other swim team members looked energetic and fresh after training, with none of the lightheadedness he felt.

"Tired! Of course we’re tired!"
"But we’ve been swimming since we were kids; we’re used to it after a dozen years," Ma Qiang explained. As they talked, they walked together toward the Jiangda University cafeteria.

According to Ma Qiang, most professional swimmers were scouted by coaches and brought into the team as early as kindergarten. Some of the "seed players" from kindergarten started practicing breaststroke in the pool before they were even weaned. The older they got, the more time they spent in the water.

As for Ma Qiang and his peers, their current daily training involved staying in the pool from morning to night whenever they weren't in class, totaling over ten hours of training per day. Compared to the nine-to-five office workers, the lives of these athletes were much harder and more monotonous, though long-term swimming did a better job of forging their stamina, endurance, and willpower.

This was Chen Jue's first attempt at swim training. While he might have put on a decent show for Ma Qiang and Coach Wang, his actual physical endurance was still far behind these professional athletes.

"They say 'one minute on stage, ten years of practice off stage.' It seems I still have a long way to go!" After hearing about Ma Qiang's journey as an athlete, Chen Jue felt a small shock. The interface only accelerated his growth; it didn't turn him into a superman overnight. If he wanted to surpass others in their professional fields, he would have to put in much more sweat.

...

He had a team meal with Ma Qiang's group at the Jiangda cafeteria, during which he learned quite a bit of obscure trivia about swimming. For instance, his favorite activity, underwater swimming, although not featured in the Olympics, had its own small-scale competitions for professional athletes.

Underwater swimming techniques were quite specialized, and formal competitions were divided into two categories: with and without equipment. The current world record for non-equipment underwater swimming was set by Russian athlete Natalia Molchanova at the 2021 AIDA Individual World Championship; she was able to swim 182 meters at the bottom of a 50-meter pool without taking a breath.

That such a massive lung capacity was achieved by a female athlete truly stunned Chen Jue. As for domestic underwater swimmers, if they were equipped with weights and professional fins, they could swim over 200 meters in a single breath. Furthermore, the posture for underwater swimming wasn't as intense as regular competitive swimming; it required the "long-arm breaststroke" technique, which used smaller limb movements to maintain long-distance inertial gliding underwater, as large movements significantly increased oxygen consumption.

"Senior, if you really like underwater swimming, you should get a lung capacity test," Ma Qiang suggested kindly, seeing how interested Chen Jue was. "Our university’s affiliated hospital has the equipment to measure it."

"A lung capacity test?" Chen Jue became interested and chatted with Ma Qiang for a while longer after dinner. He learned that lung capacity was one of the most important criteria for selecting swimmers.

Lung capacity is the volume of air one can exhale after a maximum inhalation, including tidal volume, inspiratory reserve volume, and expiratory reserve volume. A healthy, average adult usually has a lung capacity of around 3,000 milliliters, while someone who exercises regularly can increase it to 5,000 milliliters.

However, among all athletes, swimmers tended to have the largest lung capacities. Someone like Ma Qiang, a national-level swimmer, was considered quite an elite athlete; the standard for a lung capacity test for him had to exceed 7,000 milliliters to pass. As for world-class athletes like Michael Phelps or Mu Xiangxiong, they were naturally gifted, with lung capacities potentially exceeding 15,000 milliliters—nearly four or five times that of a normal person.

"The gap is that big?"
"No wonder I was so tired after swimming. My oxygen intake simply can't compare to you professionals." Chen Jue was amazed. Compared to an ordinary person, he was a smoker of ten years, and his lung capacity was clearly much lower. It was only thanks to his recent surge in "Physique" that he had been able to complete those two hours of high-intensity swim training.

...

After dinner, Chen Jue felt his stamina had recovered somewhat. After saying goodbye to Ma Qiang and the others, he carried his weighted backpack and slowly walked out of the campus. He didn't walk back to his apartment; instead, he left the backpack at the security office. Just moments ago, during the meal, he had received a coded message from Jiang Zhe: "Dog? (Yellow dog emoji)"
"Dog! (Husky sticking out tongue emoji)"

Since he was aching all over from the day's training, Chen Jue decided to find a place to relax. He took a taxi to the Jingtanghui complex and met up with Jiang Zhe in the outdoor parking lot. He saw his friend mysteriously pull a few tickets out of his pocket.

"You got them so fast!"
"As expected of my second brother, dinner is on me tonight!" Chen Jue grabbed the two tickets and checked them. They were indeed for the outdoor equestrian club. His face lit up with joy.

"Damn it! Old Fourth, what do you need two tickets for?"
"I worked so hard to get these; I was planning on giving them to some of my wife's relatives..." Jiang Zhe looked suspicious, then glanced at Chen Jue, who looked like he had been "drained." He let out an "Oh ho~" as if he had discovered a new continent.

"Holy crap! Old Fourth, are you dating?" Jiang Zhe’s voice rose an octave.
"Nothing's confirmed yet. I'm bringing her out on Saturday to meet everyone," Chen Jue waved his hand and put the tickets into the glove box of the car.

Once Jiang Zhe learned that Chen Jue had found a date, his gossiping soul burned bright. His mouth moved like a machine gun, firing off questions: Where is she from? Is she pretty? How old is she? What does she do for a living? It was a full-blown interrogation, enough to make Chen Jue roll his eyes repeatedly. The nagging level of a married man was no different from the elderly busybodies at the village entrance.

"You'll see her on Saturday, why ask so much?"
"Ask again and we're splitting the bill tonight."

Chen Jue unleashed the ultimate threat to interpersonal relationships, which immediately made Jiang Zhe shut his mouth. He muttered, "The one paying is the boss!" Then, with Jiang Zhe draping an arm over his shoulder, the two slipped into Jingtanghui.

...

Since he had spent so much time in the pool that afternoon, Chen Jue skipped the hydrotherapy this time. Instead, he hired a male masseur for a full-body massage and then went into the sauna to steam, hoping to purge some of the dampness accumulated in his body.

The effect was unexpectedly good. After an hour-long massage, the "High Fatigue" on his interface dropped to "Moderate Fatigue," and the negative values on his three attributes were halved. To keep the momentum going, Chen Jue poured his newly accumulated free attribute points into "Physique," relying on the interface's powerful recovery ability to further weaken the "Moderate Fatigue" debuff to "Mild Fatigue."

When he walked out of Jingtanghui feeling refreshed, Chen Jue specifically declined the cigarette Jiang Zhe offered him.

"Holy crap! Old Fourth, you found a girl, and now you’re planning to quit smoking too?" Jiang Zhe looked shocked. As the six of them in their college dorm were all decade-long smokers, the appearance of a defector was truly unexpected.

"Smoking is bad for your health. I’m planning to quit completely."
"Second Brother Jiang, you should smoke less, too, so you don't affect your kid at home," Chen Jue shrugged. After experiencing firsthand how smoking affected his lung capacity and lowered his physical performance during swim training, he was determined to break the bad habit. After all, he was going on a date with Teacher Wu in a few days; it would ruin the atmosphere if he showed up with yellow teeth and the stench of smoke.

"Not even a cigarette? Old Fourth, you’ve really changed!"
"I should have realized this sooner!"
"The only thing that can make a man put in such desperate effort to lose weight and get fit is a pretty girl." Jiang Zhe lit a cigarette for himself, shaking his head and sighing.

"As expected of the philosopher of our dorm!"
"I'm a bit hungry after the massage. Want to grab a late-night snack?" Chen Jue waved his hand, interrupting his friend's moment of profound realization. Because he had just added attribute points, he felt his stomach growling. The meal he had at the Jiangda cafeteria had been digested in just over two hours. Clearly, the recovery from the fatigue had triggered an abnormal spike in his metabolism.

"Let's eat! You're paying!"
"I’m going to eat you out of house and home to soothe my wounded heart for losing a fellow smoker!" Jiang Zhe looked melancholic. Without anyone to squat by the curb and smoke with, the cigarette in his hand suddenly felt flavorless.