Feeling better

First and foremost, the pug is feeling much better! After 2 weeks on his special diet he is no longer scratching and his hair is growing back! Sneakers is adapting nicely to his new food (I think he realizes that ounce for ounce, he has the most expensive dinner in the house.) An added bonus - Sneakers no longer has crusty buildup in his wrinkles. We used to call him crusty old man (because of his face, and because he loves staring at naked people in the shower, but that's a story for another day). Now the nickname only halfway applies!



Daisydoo is also raking in the benefits of Sneaker's new lifestyle. She is getting his old, weight maintenance dog food (the one he can't eat anymore because of his allergies). Because Daisy needs higher calorie food, we have been mixing the dog food with Jason's homemade chicken stew (which to us was a culinary experiment gone bad, but to Daisy is a delicacy).

I have been feeling much better too. I am getting used to the increased yardage and am no longer so on and off at practice. My 10,000 yard long swim on Friday felt like a sprint!

First Open Water Swim of the Year

Today, Jason and I ventured out to do our first open water swim of the year. It's early in the season so we thought it might be a little cold, but it was a sunny day and we were feeling dizzy from doing so many laps in the pool. We decided to try out Beaver Dam, since we had never been there before and we have a race there in a few weeks. What's nice about the lake is that is it closed to gasoline powered boats so it is very safe for swimmers.

I told Jason that I didn't want to swim if the water was below 60 degrees because I thought it would be unsafe, since we had not yet begun to acclimate to the cold. He readily agreed. We took out our trusty ducky thermometer...

And it read a toasty 70 degrees - bathwater by channel standards!

Of course, if we had 2 ounces of brains between us, we would have realized that it would be much colder in the middle of the lake that in the ankle deep water by the shore (we found out later that the temperature in the deeper parts of the lake was 65). But of course if we had that much brains our lives would be much less interesting.

It was COLD! Initially Jason stopped me every five minutes to make sure I was lucid. Eventually we got used to it, warmed up, and lasted for about 3 miles. Clearly I have a long way to go to adapt to the cold!

Week 13:
Mon: swim 4300 yds, 40 min abs
Tues: swim 5700
Wed: swim 4800, run 5 mi
Thurs: swim 5400
Fri: swim 10,000
Sat: run 5 mi
Sun: swim 4800, 30 min abs
Total: swim 35,000 yards, run 10 mi, 70 min abs