Run around a pool you ask? Why yes I did. We have a neighborhood pool a block away from us, and around the pool is this lovely, shaded path. It is a bit over a quarter of a mile, so it makes a great track when you can't get to the track to do a repeat workout. Yesterday the work out was, drum roll please...800 meter repeats! Yay for torturing yourself like that 6 times! Whoopppeeee! Nothing like them.
So we warm up around the neighborhood and get down to them. The first one I did I was pacing too closely with Brad. I think I looked like Beaker from the Muppets by the time my first one was done. Hair standing on end, eyes bugging out. Okay, 400 meter cool down here I come. Alrighty then, here we go again, I paced myself a little better, but ugh....still.....feeling.....like.....I......am......going....to....barf......
There were people working on the pool that had to think who are these lunatics? It's over 80 degrees, and they're running around like a set of mentally deranged loons.
One would think that one work out a day would be enough. Hahahahahaha, phew *wipes tears from eyes and catches breath here* that would be a negatory Houston. Brad is all happy there is a Tri Club open water swim that we will be participating in. Isn't that exciting?? I grudgingly go to these because if I don't, I get wayyyy too grossed out in the open water. It's like I have to learn to deal with the ick factor, and have coping strategies otherwise, well forget it! I cannot do it!
As luck would have it, the swim was cancelled, hooray! I was just so happy to hear that, then Brad calls me with his version of GREAT NEWS! Our friend Craig has a place where we can open water swim. The thing that gets me is I don't even get an option, he never gives me the chance to bag out of an open water swim. Maybe this is a good thing because if it were up to me, I wouldn't do them at all, but I digress. We are meeting Craig at 6, hooray for swimming with living things around you!!
As far as swimming in open water, this wasn't half bad. It was a little unnerving that I was playing with froggies to be that were at the foot of this lake. It was a little cold for me at first, a bit disorienting and I had to take my first couple of strokes with my face barely in the water. After I got acclimated I watched Craig and Brad swim way far ahead of me. I got to practice sighting which I don't get to do enough. I sighted them a bajillion meters ahead of me, but it was all good. I take a slower and steadier approach in open water. I don't want to cramp up or anything like that, so I have to stroke a lot more deliberately. My form was terrible, I kept catching myself with bending my legs and not rotating. But see, when I am in that kind of water, I am not thinking about my form like when I am in a pool. I am thinking about what if those tadpoles got in my suit in places I wouldn't want them? Or, what if there's a big fish just waiting to attack my toes, or a snapping turtle? Those things are dog @ss ugly, or what if there are snakes, which then made me think of eels, and then I thought of unagi, which is a fresh water eel sushi that I really like. So see, there is a peek into the inner machinations of my mind as I swim in something teeming with life. There is no concentration on my form, which isn't second nature for me yet, so it suffers and I tend to waste a lot more energy then I should.
Before you know it I had reached them, we turned around and off we went back to the beach where we started. I got out, I was getting a little cold actually and toweled off while Craig went hunting for a turtle he had seen. I had to laugh, I went back to playing with the froglets, if you left your feet still enough, they would come and peck at them sort of, it was kind of neat really. But then I got thinking what if one of them made their way into my suit and were pecking in places they shouldn't?? Ugh, mental brush, mental brush, scrub, scrub, scrub.
As Brad and Craig were chattering away, I watched a hawk flying back and forth overhead majestically and hoping there weren't tadpoles in my suit. It was a nice swim in a lake, a grueling run around a pool kind of day and a day hoping I left all the tadpoles I had seen in the lake I had been in....
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