Saturday Bricking

First, before I forget, Pete and I saw someone windsurfing on Calhoun today. Please understand that the ice just broke yesterday. If we weren't on bikes I would have stopped to take a picture.

I was up very bright and early this morning. Despite setting my alarm for 7am I was bright eyed and bushy tailed at 6:30. I managed to drink some coffee, eat a bowl of oatmeal and relax a bit before Pete and I headed to the Downtown Y to meet Marie for our 8am swim. I love the Downtown Y, have I mentioned that? There are only about 5 swim lanes to begin with and two of them are always used for open swimming, not for laps. There were three lap lanes open. Each with a marker on the end: Fast, Medium and Slow, indicating which lane you should swim in depending upon your speed. There was a nice elderly gentleman in the "Fast" lane doing the back stroke at a nice slow pace. There was a woman in the "Slow" lane just hanging out at the end of the pool sort-of bobbing up and down. Logically we took the middle "Medium" lane to share between the three of us.

Now that I'm down to one day a week of swimming, my shoulder is so much happier. Today consisted of:

• 200 meters - warm-up
• 200 meters - kicking (with a kickboard)
• 8x 50 (400 meters) of drills - In Pete's words "Super wide-arm entry" and " Straight arm recovery"
• 3x 200 (600 meters) of build up to hard, 30 sec of rest between each set of 200. This one is tough because the length of the pool is 25 meters. Each 25 meters I'm supposed to be building up, getting faster and faster. But at this point I'm working pretty hard, so really I feel like I'm just maintaining the same damn speed.
• 4x 50 Hard (200) ("That's what she said!") with 30 seconds of rest in between. This one is definitely much faster, not quite all-out, but fast. I can always do the first length of 25 meters pretty fast, but as soon as I turn around its like all the steam as left me. Some day I would really really love to do these drills in a 50 meter pool!
• I was supposed to do a 200 meter cool down, but I had to pee, and since they really frown up people peeing in the pool, I kept it to a 100 meter cool down.

So! Today's successful swim of 1700 meters (1.06 miles) felt really great.

We promptly came home, made hard boiled eggs (to be deviled later) and a cucumber salad (to be consumed later) Yum! Tossed on our bike gear and headed out for what was a two hour ride, but not nearly the speed or distance we were hoping for. The headwind was so strong that I felt like I was climbing Mount Everest at only 1o mph. The sun made it completely bearable and luckily made for a very nice tailwind on the way home. Now I'm sitting and relaxing on the front porch, probably going to nap soon with the Tiggs. It was a good morning. And since its still only 12:30, I have plenty of time to enjoy a great Saturday!

I hope Marie's run of 10+ miles went well!