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

Swimming to my own beat....

I am sad to report that after a short 3 and a half months of life, my SwimM3 player has passed on. Perhaps it is now making music in a better place, blasting Bruce Springsteen and Kanye West for long distances swimmers in the sky.

As soon as I find the receipt, box, etc I will mail it back and try to get it repaired/replaced. But having swum this whole week with no music except the voices in my head, I've realized how dependent I've become on this little device. From now on, I'm going to use my SwimP3 player only during long swims (yes, I know I said this before, but this time I mean it!)


R.I.P, swimP3


Making my own music

Week 10:
Mon: swim 4100 yds
Tues: swim 4700
Wed: swim 4100
Thurs: swim 4800
Fri: swim 10,000
Sat: rest
Sun: swim 5300, run 6 mi
Total: swim 31,000 yds, run 6 mi

Stroke of genius

Have you ever had one of those thoughts that, once conceived, you knew that your life - and dare I say it, the world - would never be the same? A moment of truth so profound that its ripples were bound to shape not only your life but those of generations to come? Well, dear friends, I had one such revelation this week. It can be summed up in one word - slurpees.

This weekend Karen had to go out of town, so we did our long swim on Friday after work. We didn't have much time (a 13,000 yard practice takes us about 3 hr, 15 min. The Homestead pool closes at 8:30, so we both had to rush over after work). I also didn't have time to eat much that day, so I grabbed a quick bagel and then stopped at a gas station to pick up some Gatorade. That's when I saw it - sitting inconspicuously in the corner, its juicy insides sloshing around in frozen splendor. The slurpee machine. It hit me - wouldn't a slurpee be a tastier, more concentrated form of Gatorade?

Just as expected, the slurpee proved itself to be a delightful little energy drink. The only problem was, I had only one and it lasted through only the 1st half hour of the workout. After it was gone, I made it through the rest of the practice with noticeably less vigor.

Outside of Halloween, there aren't many occasions where it's desirable to squeeze as much sugar into your body as possible, but long swims might be one of them. Next time I will skip the Gatorade and have 2 or 3 slurpees instead. Of course this will necessitate another kind of training...

Training for the inevitable brain freeze


Now, there are bound to be naysayers. Some might say that the icy waters of the English Channel would not be the place for the consumption of a frozen beverage. But that is the way with all great ideas. Did people not laugh when Galileo said that the earth revolved around the sun?

Week 9:

Mon: swim 5100 yds, 40 min abs
Tues: swim 5300
Wed: swim 4200, 40 min abs
Thurs: swim 4000
Fri: swim 13,000
Sat: run 7 mi, walk 2mi
Sun: walk 2 mi, swim 3400, 10 min core exercises

Total: swim 35,000, walk/run 11 mi, 90 min abs/core exercises

This is not a sex toy...

No really, it's not!!

It's the Brookstone IGallup, a core exercise machine. I've had my eye on this baby for some time and now that it is majorly on sale I bought one. It's a lot like riding a horse (or so I'm told) and it has different settings so you can go from a trot to a walk to a gallup. You won't get knocked off or knocked up on this machine, but you really do work your core muscles trying to stabilize yourself. It's a painless way to get in some extra core work while watching TV.

Outside of getting the IGallup, week 9 has been a tough week. I've fallen into the pattern of swimming well on Tues, Thurs, Fri, and on my weekendend long swim, and swimming poorly on Mon and Wed (for whatever reason, those are the days my body is most tired). Well, this week began by following the familiar pattern. Except when it came time for my long swim on Saturday, I was so tired that I almost felt sick. For the first time, I was not able to even make it through the swim, and I got out after 9,000 yds, instead of 12,000. I then slept 11 hours, rested most of the day today, and now I'm starting to feel better.

At my ripe, old age of 27, I think it's time I started paying more attention to muscle recovery. My friend Matt has gotten me hooked on drinking chocolate milk immediately after practice (supposedly it has the perfect mixture of milk protein and carbs that your muscles need to refuel, but any excuse to drink chocolate milk, right?) Now I'm going to step it up a notch. I'm trying something called Muscle Milk light, which has only 160 calories but a whopping 20g of protein.
I'm also going to try to stretch every night, in hopes that I may one day be able to touch my ankles.

Week 8:
Mon: swim 4200 yds, 40 min abs
Tues: swim 4900, 10 min core exercise machine
Wed: swim 4800, 10 min core exercise machine
Thurs: swim 4200, 40 min abs
Fri: swim 3200, run 3 mi
Sat: swim 9100
Sun: rest
Total: total swim 30,500, run 3 mi 100 min abs/core work.

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.

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!