Tweedledeedledeep

While I'm not a birder or even a bird fancier, I have nothing against birds. I've been known to ooh or aah over a particularly beautiful or unusual specimen but mostly I can take or leave them. Except when they're outside my bedroom window heralding the dawn at 4:30 am. At 150 decibels. Then I'm thinking about finding a slingshot or maybe a howitzer and taking them out. Damn birdy, I have enough trouble sleeping as it is, I don't need to be serenaded in my bed and awoken hours before my alarm.

I really needed the sleep after the hellacious swim workout last night. Because Claudia and I have decided to swim at Shadow Cliffs on Thursday, we decided to switch the scheduled workouts for the two nights; do Thursday's drills on Tuesday and Tuesday's workout on Thursday. Got it? So I printed out both sets of workouts and brought them to the pool. We convinced Phil to switch with us so we'd all be doing the same swim. Claudia taught us that if you soak the paper it will stick to the side of the pool, making it easier to keep reading the drills.

The reason we did this was that Thursday's schedule was for a bunch of repeats of sets of different drills; Tuesdays workout was just several hundred yards of different levels of effort, making it easier to remember what we were supposed to do while we were swimming in the lake without a cheat sheet. So we did all the warm ups and went to read what we were supposed to do next and -- whoopsie -- the sheet was at the bottom of the pool in the next lane. I swam over and got it but by then the paper was pulp. We ended up doing the intensity drills instead and holy paper pulper, Batman, that done us in!

I figured that like in running I have about 2 speeds in swimming: slow and slower. But the drills we were doing called for level 2, 3, 5 and 7. Level 7?? 200 yards of level 7?? Oy. For the first time I was really sweating and overheating while swimming. In fact, I felt just as crappy as if I'd been running speed repeats on a track for a mile. I even managed my first ever hot flash while swimming. And don't even get me started on asthmatic breathing.

We made it through, complete with a nice little cool down. We dragged our sorry bodies out of the pool and anticipated that we'd be nice and sore for track tonight. Oh yeah, it's going to be a challenge doing track drills!

We're going to be so darn well trained for our triathlons that we're going to kick butts and take names. If we don't fall on our faces and sleep through the next three month's training ...