decidedlyodd

It’s 12:47am. At midnight, it was still 85F with a heat index of 91F outside. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be 102F with a dew point of 71F.

Fortunately, I’m heading out to sunny southern California for two weeks of dry warmth.

Today I had one of the best swim workouts in a long time. I did 40 laps (1000 yards) in 30 minutes. More importantly, I was able to take only very short breaks in between laps. Typically, I was swimming 100 yards of something (crawl, breast, back, kicking) continuously with only very brief breaks (15 seconds) in between. I took one longish break of about a minute about half way through and got a drink of water from the fountain. I focused a lot on alternating between different kinds of strokes and tried to pace myself especially with the crawl. I deliberately swam slowly and focused on not speeding up when I got winded. I did another 4 laps in the process of practicing flip turns afterwards, although I don’t feel like I may any progress on the turns. I’m finding it somewhat difficult to practice them once I’m tired from the main part of the workout. It’s just something that’s going to take a while to master I suppose. I did, however, try to merge the turning and pushing off as somebody mentioned in a comment on a previous post. It did seem to make things a little bit easier. I’m still ending up too deep in the water a lot of the time and not recovering particularly well from the flip turn, BUT at least I am turning over and able to swim off in the opposite direction.

It was a great workout, although at one point I realized I had put my suit on inside out. Oops. I felt like a total dork. You wouldn’t have really been able to tell except the tag in the back was on the outside, because it’s actually a water polo suit made out of PBT (and no, I didn’t buy my suit from that site—I just found it while googling). Whatever I guess. It was still a great day for swimming. It’s so hot that I probably won’t be able to go jogging tomorrow. Ideally, I’ll hit up the pool before I take off for the airport tomorrow afternoon. I need to be at the airport around 3:30pm, which means leaving by 3pm if I have a ride or around 1:30pm if I need to take the bus. So far I haven’t had any luck finding a ride from anybody. Mike was going to give me a ride before he remember there’s a GAMMA meeting tomorrow around that time (doh). Not being able to find a ride just reminds me of how few friends I really have around here I guess, although I should probably keep in mind that a lot of people are out of town during the summer.