YSL: Week 13, Day 4

Steady State Bike, 1 hour
Avg HR: 141 :( (ought to have been between 151-160, but, as they say, i just couldn't get it up.)
Cubs game!
Tempo Run with strides, 20 minutes. Forgot HR monitor. :(

Shake for breakfast
Shake for lunch
Shake for in betweens
When I got the urge to munch.
It's time that's a factor; not so much things like
weight.
But must I eat
Like I'm getting a head start
On a geriatric state?

YSL: Poetry Friday

Design Flaw
A Haiku
Thirteen sleek cutouts
Makes helmet light, keeps head cool
Perfect for winter.

Falling
The smell of chlorine makes me laugh.
The sight of winter dirt all over my bike
is nice, too.
I don't struggle to find my gear anymore.
I see my friends
on Tuesday nights
and we go for "easy five-milers"
and I look forward to it.
I fell the other day
and got to do nothing for two
and was cranky.
Is this what they call
Turning the corner?

----------------

No real activity for the past two days. Sat in a hot bath night with Time magazine for twenty minutes and then stretched and gave myself an ice massage. Yikes. As if my poor, stressed-out winter skin needed any more on its plate! Sheesh.
Pretty blue last night for not getting to do anything. Ate an enormous roast beef sandwich in lieu of my tempo workout.
Coach Mike says rest and ice; Jim says being blue will slow down the recovery. I saw, just lemme back on the fricken horse already. :(
It's better today--not as stiff. I get to hop on the bike today for a short time, see how it is. Maybe I'll go to the pool tonight for some pull laps.

YSL: Poetry Friday

The Sun Rises
It is dark when I get up
It is dark while I swim
Why did I paint my toes
Such a cheerless shade of mauve?


Food Joy
'Twas late one night
post-vegetarian dinner, you see
I tossed and turned;
Peeked at the clock (it was three)
When finally I fell
into a deep, deep sleep
I dreamed
(most regrettably, it seems)
That
I
Ate
A Meatloaf
'Twas wrapped in Bacon,
with a capital B; then sprinkled liberally with parsley
(Why? That I could already eat)
There was a nice fluffy dish
of mashed potatoes beside.

But then I woke up,
drooling and lonely.

No more! The chains of the veggie lifestyle
have been cast aside
Now I eat what I want to
and set the guilt aside

for later.

Lousy Day
I want not
to work out
Today.

YSL: Days 45, 46, 47 (Poetry Friday)

45: Totally exhausted from Day 44. Did endurance bike workout at a snail's pace and forgot the hill repeats.

46: Swam in the morning. Coach Mike has down an hour but he says that if I want to I can adjust certain parts of the workout to fit the thing into an hour, so I opted out of 200 yards of drills and 200 yards of kick strokes. That cut me down to around 1:10. Did not do transition workout base (hour bike; 1/2 hour run) due to scheduling snafu and deadline hell; pushed it to Friday (today).

47: supposed to do a swim test; Coach Mike says to do a recovery swim instead, but it looks like it's going to be the TWB i missed from yesterday.

I've gone out every single fricken night this week, either for work or otherwise. I'm exhausted and laying low. Somewhere in my head I remember Mike telling me I was going to have to rejigger my priorities. Is this what he meant?

Poetry Friday
Slip, splash, zipping here and there.
Frenzied kicking, water frothy,
Muscles tight and tamed.
But in Lane One
--that's the Floater Lane--
serenity reigns.

Their swimsuits are loose;
their skin is loose, too, and crepey.
Bellies balloon outwards; skin is white and pasty.
They bob slowly
to and fro
enjoying the feel of the water
Not hurrying; not counting--
An outrageous idea, this smling while swimming;
What happiness in Lane One!

YSL: 39

Poetry Friday

I.
Oh, fourth-lane-over
How I hate you.
Your lane markings
Match not at all
With the lane buoys
This is why
I have a scratch on my thumb
and one on my nose
Practically

II.
I have to pee
I have five millllllion laps left
I have to pee
The Gatorade is all gone
Why did I drink it all?

III.
The stuff on the bottom
is more than flotsam
less than jetsam
One Band-Aid
Two Band-Aids
One more in the gutter
and oh look--a tuft of hair
that probably belongs to the hairy guy in my lane

I finished my "hour-long" workout in one hour and 13 minutes. I did it all and took all of the rest breaks I was supposed to take. Sometime during my last set, though, I stopped feeling like I was being efficient. The world seemed to slow down and I seemed to be just floating in the water, in stasis, even though I was moving my arms and legs like I was swimming.
I got up at 5 this morning so I could eat something and have coffee before I went to the pool, but I forgot the eating part.

YSL: Day 5

Open letter, to the Freshwater, Chlorine-resistant shark that lives in the bowels of the Gill Park pool:

Dear creature,
Could you please not pay attention to the fact that I am the only one in the pool?Also, if you could not pay attention to the fact that there is an apparent problem with my stroke that causes to me whack myself in the back of my head with my left arm. I know, it makes me look crippled. Also, ignore the laziness with which I am swimming. Oh, look: you can eat that pasty creature that just swam across my lane to get to an open lane. Yes, that rude being over there in the ugly swim shorts. Eat him instead. He might have more body fat than me.

Most Sincerely,
Miss Midwesterly

45:14
35 laps

8:40-9:25 PM

And now, for something new and different...

An ode to neighboring swimmer in green
I thought you were fast
Lapped me again!
But you were flippered.

I supposed it could be that the reason I lost track of my laps was because I was busy pretending to be Poet Laureate of Gill Park, but the truth is, I've never been any good at counting laps. I like to forget things.
Anyway, today was the first workout of many, as prescribed to me by one very scary Coach Mike. We're in something he calls "transition" phase, which calls to mind haphazard dashing from one discipline to another, but which apparently means transitioning ME from sluggish boozehound to lean mean triathloning machine.
For the first five weeks Coach Mike has me on timed workouts only, and that suits me just fine.
Today's swim was a 40-minute crawl. I slept a whopping four hours, and not very good ones at that, and popped awake at 5:34. I tried in vain to get back to sleep until the alarm went off, but that didn't happen.
The swim itself was fine, except for the annoying flippered swimmer mentioned above, and I enjoyed myself. I had a funny wobbly moment when I got out of the pool after exactly 40 minutes and 27 seconds and somewhere between 30 and 32 laps. At the moment, four hours after my swim, my right hamstring feels a little tight, and I do remember actually whacking myself in the back of my head with my left hand during one stroke recovery, so those things bear mentioning and learning from. (Hi, stroke assistance, anyone?)
Tomorrow it's a swim and then short jog (20-25 minutes, says Coach Mike; no more). We'll see how this all comes together. My first 5K is January 20th, and I have a 10K scheduled February 2nd, so I'm eager to get some runs in.
Until then--cheers from this side of the Atlantic.