What Animal Am I?

Tuesday, I was a shark.

Wednesday, I was... well, whatever animal that would make a good cyclist. I was that. The same again on Thursday evening.

Later on Thursday night, I was a dolphin.

Then, an alligator.

Then, a warthog.

I think all the animal analogies had me a little confused. I did great as a shark, hunting down my lanemates and passing them in the timetrial. The bike was great too, both nights. As a dolphin, I excel- although I can't say that the arms portion of the butterfly is even close to elegant. Still, it wasn't terrible, and I could keep it together.

I just don't do alligator very well. The theme for Thursday's swim was sighting-- okay, I've done that before, poorly, but I've done it. Well, we were trying a new technique. Rather than sight on a breath, thus holding your entire head out of the water, the idea behind alligator sighting is that you just peek your eyes out of the water, like an alligator.

Coach Jill was videotaping us, and the only clip of me goes stroke, stroke, choke-- head comes right up, sputtering and cursing.

By the end of the session, it was passable. I found that if I only tried to do it after breathing on the left, I could get a bit of a rhythm. (I like to breathe every three strokes)

After the swim was the usual core workout. In this, I definitely need work. The workout was tough, but I was grunting and huffing like a warthog-- and I sure felt like one! So here's to being a shark (or dolphin) in the water, a kangaroo on the bike, and a wolf on the run.

Or maybe we should just forget about the animal analogies.

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Okay, about the kangaroo... massive "quad" muscles = good cyclist, right?

Swim TimeTrial

Well, it just might be time for me to move to the deep end. (Yikes!)

What does that mean? Well, the deep end has faster swimmers, doing a higher-volume workout each time. I'd suspected that I was right in between, because the cutoff is a 30-minute 1500m, and I knew I was close to that. Today, I had the chance to really find out where I stack up, as the workout today was a half hour warmup followed by a timetrial. So how'd I do?

27:29

Yep. And that's all 30 laps, 60 lengths, 1500m. It's a great time, but it puts a little more pressure on me to make the move to the shark tank. I think I'll give it another week.

Making Tracks

I'm so proud of my honey! I remember when a 20 minute run was a real challenge - and yesterday, we did over an hour. Fish Creek Park sure looks different in the winter; it's bare, but beautiful. There's a sense of openness that is a little bizzare, until you realize it's because there's no tall grass, and no leaves on any of the trees.
You can tell there are a lot of people using the park-- you don't see as many as in the summer, but there are bike tracks, foot prints, tire treads from the plow, and even some cross-country ski tracks. We managed to do the entire loop.
Today, we also got to the pool portion of Super Sunday. I did 3,100 m
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Although racing season hasn't really started yet, it's certainly Registration season! I'm signed up for Melissa's in September (thanks, Dan!), and early-bird registration for the Vulcan Tinman is next weekend.

More to come.