Under the weather

This week was a very exciting one for us folks in Durham...we got snow! And enough snow to stick. We don't get snow here very often, so when we do everything shuts down. I had a holiday, a snow day, a teacher work day, and I took a sick day this week, so I only worked on Friday! Since I had a terrible cold, which on Thursday morphed into a fever, I was glad for the extra rest.

There was much frolicking in the snow, and general merriment about the extra time off:

So with my cold and the snow, I didn't get as much swimming in as I wanted to, but week four was still pretty productive:

Week 4:
Mon: swim 4500 yds
Tues: run 6 mi
Wed: swim 4300, 40 min abs
Thurs: fever - rest
Fri: swim 3200
Sat: swim 2500, 40 min abs
Sun: swim, 11,000, run 4 mi

Total:
swim 25,500 yds
run 10 mi
80 min abs

On Sunday, my usual swim buddies were at a meet in Charlotte, so I ventured to the Dark Side (Tar Heel territory) to swim at a new pool in Chapel Hill, with my friend Filippo. The pool is very fancy and new, and worth the $6 it costs to swim there.

We ended up doing 110 x 100 yds on 1:30, which ended up being a lot harder that the 100 x 100yds that we did on New Years on the same interval. I believe that the reason for this was threefold: 1) I swam 10% farther today 2) I swam slightly faster (averaging about a 1:18 pace instead of a 1:20 pace) 3) and I had the lane to myself, so I didn't get to draft off of Karen for half of the workout.

After practice, I was starving and grabbed some dinner at the hot bar at whole foods. Now, while I have been trying to lose weight in general (I've lost 5 lbs since New Years! woot woot), I pretty much eat whatever I want after long swims because I figure my body needs the nourishment. I gathered what I wanted from the hot bar and then looked down at my plate with alarm - I had filled it with mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, lakte (potato pancakes) and a few french fries. That's a crazy amount of carbs! Feeling that I needed to balance things out a bit, I added a couple of pieces of bacon as well as a pile of broccoli.
I chose to interpret this carb frenzy as my body's signal that my glycogen supply was zilch and that it wanted it replaced right away.

Rest Week

Well all this swimming has finally caught up with me. My arms have gone from bags of sand, to bricks, to lead, to uranium, to eka-radon (a hypothetical element that supposedly is the heaviest thing possible). Well, you get the picture.

I was planning on making this a relative rest week, which I embraced happily. With no long swim this week and 2 days off of swimming in a row, my arms feel much better! Unfortunately, I now have a cold.

On another note, I found another race that I want to do this year. It's a 10 mile swim in a very scenic lake in Vermont. It looks very pretty, but cold: http://www.kingdomaquafest.com/

Week 3:
Mon: swim 4200 yds, abs
Tues: swim 4500
Wed: swim 4000, abs
Thurs: swim 4000, run 5 mi
Fri: rest
Sat: run 7 mi
Sun: swim 4300, abs

Total: swim 21,000 yds
run 12 mi
2 hrs abs

Sweet nectar of the gods

For the New Year, Jason and I began modified version of the flat belly diet, which, to my horror, requires the elimination of soda. But we're doing a modified version of the diet, so there's no need to go crazy, right? I figure it's OK to have a diet soda or two, as long as I drink all the water that I need first. So my new rule is no diet soda until I've had 64 oz of water. After I drink my water, I'll have a diet soda or two in the afternoon and then will usually drink another 32 oz of water at swim practice.

So in the past week I've gone from about 7 diet cokes a day to one or two, and from very little water to about 12 glasses. At first, it was very hard for me to cut back on the sweet nectar of the gods. The first day I was tired, grumpy, and in general much less charming than usual (see exhibit a).

exhibit a

The good thing is, it made sticking to our diet much easier. When you break your leg, you no longer notice a paper cut. Similarly, when you drastically cut back on such a crisp, refreshing beverage, you miss it too much to notice that you miss junk food too.

After the first few days things got much much easier. If fact, I felt great. I told Jason that I felt like I was on some wonderful drug. "Yes," the smart ass replied, "the drug is called hydration."

Anyway, fully hydrated and properly nourished, week 2 of English Channel training went as follows:

Mon: swim 4200, do 30 min of abs work
Tues: swim 4200
Wed: swim 3100
Thurs: swim 3700, 30 min abs
Fri: swim 2600, run 5 mi
Sat: Run 7 mi
Sun: Swim 10,000

Total: swim 28,000, run 12 mi, 1 hr of abs

Happy New Year!!

To usher in 2009, my swim friends and I completed our traditional 10,000 New Year swim practice. This may not seem like a fun thing to do after a night of drinking, but it's good luck. Very good luck. Since I don't like black eyed peas, this is one way to ensure a prosperous New Year.

7 of us showed up, at 8:00 am. There was several workouts to choose from, but to get it done as quickly as possible, we settled on doing 100 x 100yds. I swam with my friend Karen and we decided to do the set on a modest interval of 1:30, but to do it without stopping. With my new underwater MP3 player on (a Christmas present from Jason!), the practice was surprisingly painless and we were done in 2.5 hours. So it looks like this will be a lucky year! We had a very tasty brunch at Cracker Barrel afterward.

I also thought that that New Year would be a good time to officially start training for the English Channel. Clearly I have a lot of work ahead of me, but here is what I was able to crank out for week one:

Mon: swim 4400 yds, run 5 mi
Tues: swim 3100 yds in the am, swim 3200 yds in the pm
Wed: rest
Thurs: swim 10,000 yds (New Year practice!)
Fri: swim 3900 yds
Sat: Run 5 mi
Sun: Walk 5 mi

Week 1 total: swim 25,000 yds, run/walk 14 mi

Now on to week 2!