Improvement

Tuesday night I met up with Olivia for our usual run. It was hot again, and strangely smoggy. The air quality reports all showed the air as being normal, but the haze was hovering over the valley and the air wasn't easy to breathe. I considered bagging the run but thought better of it and decided I'd just take it easy.

Easy translated to our fastest run yet, averaging a whole second per mile faster than a week ago (oooh, a whole second!) (sarcasm off). Strangely enough, our perceived exertion was that we were running harder and going slower. Yes on the running harder part, no on the going slower. It was nice that we worked that hard and it had results. I really should make more of an effort to slow down, my breathing was gaspy and wheezy and I can't do that for a long run. The muscle memory in my legs will have them going faster than my lungs can get air for.

Tonight Phil and I restarted our swimming. Along with Claudia (who couldn't make it tonight) we're hoping to swim once weekly, just to keep up our conditioning. We worked very hard to get to the 3000+ yard level and don't want to lose it. Since it's been almost 3 weeks for me and 4 weeks for Phil we decided to start at a lower level. Ok, I decided to start at a lower level when I printed out our workout.

I was looking through our past training for about 2000 yards and found a 1900 yard workout from the early part of the season. There were a few drills and sets of level 5 and level 7 so it was a good test. After seeing how I swam during the tri, I've changed my form. In my previous training I didn't kick much, mostly just to keep my balance. During the tri I kicked most of the time, although lightly. So tonight I was kicking. Also, during training I was alternating breaths from left to right; during the tri I took a breath every left stroke and felt the extra oxygen helped. Tonight I only alternated my breathing during the level 3 sets; during the level 5 and level 7 sets I breathed every left stroke and it improved my performance.

I thought it was strange when I finished after 48 minutes; I didn't remember any of our early trainings being that short. I checked my log and the first time I did this workout it took me about 54 minutes. It's nice to see that I haven't lost any conditioning and that I definitely improved over the season.

Last night I fell asleep a bit earlier than usual. Then I awoke at 3:00 am and knew that my sleep for the night was over. I was still tired, didn't want to move or get out of bed, but I was no longer sleepy. My back was hurting and I had a headache. I tossed and turned and tossed and turned for another 3 hours before I gave it up. I spent the entire day at work with a wicked headache and my back hurting more than it's done for weeks. I didn't want to swim, wanted to just go home and sulk and pout and whine. But I had made the commitment to Phil and know how much I dislike it when someone cancels on me so I forced myself to show up. I'm glad I did. My headache is gone, my back feels fine.

Yay for swimming!