Saturday, May 17, 2014

things that aren't weird usually but are when you are in a pool

First of all - I suggest not trying to write a blog post while catching up on past episodes of Grey's Anatomy (or Nashville, or The Following - all of which I have at least five episodes just waiting for me to get through on my DVR) because you will make incredibly slow progress.  Also - it's not even like you can use commercials to catch up because you just fast forward through them...but I digress.

Every Saturday morning we have Tri Club practice that consists of swimming for about 45 minutes to an hour followed by a 4ish mile run (well some people do more and some do less, but that is about where I am at right now).  I've really come to look forward to these Saturday morning workouts - of course I enjoy the other training opportunities we have throughout the week - but Saturday mornings are my favorite.  Maybe it is because it's not at 5:30 in the morning and everyone is just naturally more chatty (given they likely didn't just wake up).  Whatever the reason - I have come to really enjoy my Saturdays from 8 - 10am.

The past few weeks I've felt the swim workouts have been really challenging, but to me that's better.  I think it's because now instead of learning to swim, I can actually swim.  I'm definitely not perfect, but maybe someday soon :) Today's I felt was especially challenging, but I rarely felt out of breath and like I had to stop, which is a new experience to me in my swim game.

Which brings me to the title of my post, 'things that aren't weird usually but are when you are in a pool' - although I suppose you could replace 'pool' with any body of water.  Halfway through one of the cycles we were swimming today, I noticed my throat was quite dry.  Which is normal when you are doing something like running - so I'm not surprised that exerting physical effort in the water caused the same thing to happen.  But it's so weird when you are in the water because you are already in water and there is not a drop you can drink to do anything about it - not like you can just take a drink of the water you are in (I mean, you could, but it probably wouldn't work out so well in the end).  

Another thing from today which was a weird feeling was I felt sweaty in the water.  Usually I think of water as something that can cool you down after being sweaty (ie - if you are at the beach - you get in the water to cool off).  But how do you get un-sweaty when you are already in said body of water, and sweating because of it?  Have I ever mentioned I have very random thoughts?

Otherwise, the workout was good, but just challenging as I said before.   But every week I make it through practice is one closer to being able to complete my first 750M swim for the Sprint in June and then the 1.5k swim for the Olympic in August.  All I can say is I am happy that the 750M is coming up first, and the long one is still three months away.

Aside from the swim, I ran another four miles today.  I do mean to sometime increase that distance - but swimming for 45 minutes and then setting out for a long, brisk jog is quite tiring.  All in the name of building lung capacity and endurance I suppose.  Now I will most certainly eat my day away, because days that include swimming mean I will be a bottomless pit.

One more thing before I go.  On a more exiting note - for those of you who are interested (does anyone even read this??), REI is having a HUGE sale right now (in stores and online).  Mark and I checked it out last night and got some good stuff - bike gear, etc.  I almost scored a great deal on a wetsuit, but then it had a hole ripped in that so that was kind of lame - but they do have plenty of undamaged goods just waiting to be purchased!  The purchase I am most excited about are the Suunto GPS running watches we got.  I even went with the fancy kind that has an accelometer (or something like that) that counts swim strokes and bike pace.  Fancy stuff.  They didn't have them in stock in store, though, so I'll really let you know how cool they are once we receive them in the mail.

Until next time.  Stay fit my friends.



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