Skip to main content

Work in Progress - x2!

12-9-16 (again)

Heeeey! I did it! I decided that my exhaustion is likely just depression and I'm going to push through it. Instead of thinking how tired I am, I say "This is what hard work feels like."

I packed my swim bag and made it to the gym after work! I got there about 4:15p and was in the water by 4:25p! There were two old guys in the pool who, no joke, talked about Social Security and stocks, as they walked in the water.



The water felt great and the sun was shining in at just the right angle. I really enjoyed going back and forth, knowing exactly when I hit a sunbeam because the water was warmer. (That or the old dudes were peeing...) Either way, hah, it was nice!

I tried to focus on lengthening my stroke. Initially it took me around 24-25 strokes per length so I worked on -
1. Rotating my torso
2. Keeping my upper arms closer to my ears
3. Trying to be as long as possible (reaching farther forward and keeping my toes pointed)
4. Looking straight down at the line, instead of slightly forward

Of course, this didn't really work! Hah. Between that and the whole breathing thing, I could only keep one in mind at a time.

After about half an hour, I was able to consistently get it down to 23 strokes per length. Ahhhh well...




You remember how the last time I swam I said how important it was not to skip a week? Well of course it has been about a week since I last swam! Guess what? STILL HARD.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pain is thy name

12-16-16 Okay so this is actually for yesterdays workout, I was too busy to write it up. The plan was swimming but I didn't have a solid plan in mind, which is always risky. On my drive to the gym at dark and cold thirty in the morning, I decided to go for 800 meters, using only freestyle strokes to help increase my endurance. I did 200 meters of the 800 warming up (!) with both freestyle and breastrokes pretty easily. The water felt good, my head felt clear. I started to progress forward, telling myself it was only 600 meters, which is 'only' 12 lengths. Things felt good, but my quads were tiring out quickly. My guess is that I'm kicking from the knee, which requires more quad usage, than kicking from the hip, which is more core/glute usage. This doesn't surprise me as I'm like everyone else in the world and very quad dominant in most exercises. Anywhoo, when I hit 500 meters, I realized that every time I get to one of the pool ends, I stop, sta...

1, 2, 3

11/22/16 I'm alive! Mexico was phenomenal and I got the chance to use my newly created swimming skills out in the ocean! We did a ton of snorkeling and now I'm sad that we have ZERO snorkeling in Texas. A cool thing I noticed was that I'm so much more confident in the water now than I ever have been. Whenever I've gone snorkeling before or had to swim in the ocean, I more or less panicked. This trip I actually enjoyed myself. It's great that the salt water helped make me extra buoyant as well!! This morning I was back at the gym by 5:30am. I read that doing 16 lengths (back and forth) in a 25 meter pool is 400 meters. (Simple math escapes me again.) This is about how long most Sprint Tri Swim distances are. Well I've never really attempted to count all the lengths I swam since I was mostly focused on drinking less water. Now that I'm writing all this down, it's clear to me I did my counts wrong. I wasn't counting a back and forth lap, merely co...

FW Run Co Christmas Tree Run!

12-20-16 Yesterday Amy P and I met up at the Fort Worth Running Company (FW Run CO, for the hipsters), around 6pm so we could run their annual Christmas Tree run. It's when a large 'herd' of people run from the FW Run CO to the Big A Christmas tree in Sundance square (1.5 miles), take a picture, then turn around and head back. Last year they had Adidas mugs with hot chocolate and Baileys! This year it was the FW RUN CO mugs with hot coco and cookies! Well, it was hovering around 32 degrees when we started out and let me tell you- that is brisk for this girl. I was wearing a long sleeve tech shirt, a short sleeve shirt, a hoodie over that, ear warmers, capris and gloves! Obviously, over dressed as I was sweating like mad, but the minute I would take something off, I'd freeze! The way up to the Christmas tree has a particularly unkind uphill, but it was fun to push! I like running in urban areas because you get to stop at all the red lights! We made it to the Tree...