Swim...Swim...Swim...

This week is the first week that I don't have the Ultimate Cycling anymore. It feels great. I have more time to do other things, sleep and rest. Mary, my coach, just bought a new underwater camera. We met her at the Mountain View aquatic center on Wed night. She was going to film us swim. I was so excited about this because I wanted to know how my strokes looked (Plus this session was free. Other coaches would charge $75-$100 for underwater analysis). Do I drop my elbows, do I catch the water when I pull, do I rotate my hips etc? Oliver would go underwater to watch us swim and gave us feedback but it was not the same when you could see it with your own eyes.

Mary made us swim several laps, back and forth. She took it from the front, the side, back and above water. After that, we sat down with her. She plugged her camera to her laptop, so we could see it better in a bigger screen. It's so funny to see yourself swim. I now understood when Oliver said my right hand was not pulling straight down right away as soon as it entered the water. Instead, I was wiggling. If I have a pen at the tip of my fingers, I was drawing an S. I didn't know why I did that. My left hand was fine. That's one issue that I have to fix. It sounded easy but since it was something that I had been doing for a while, it was hard to break an old habit.

That night I woke up with a sore throat. I took care of myself, getting enough sleep, eating my veggies, taking my vitamin, but when you got sick, you're just sick. Couldn't do anything about it. I took Zicam right away. It's a Zinc supplement that was proven to reduce the severity and length of your cold. Sometimes when you were lucky, the sore throat went away in a few hours and you didn't get a cold. I was unlucky this week. It got worse. I was sneezing a lot and my nasal was congested. It was official I was sick. On Thursday I could see dark lines under my eyes. I got that when I had a cold. I texted Mary to ask her what the minimum miles I had to run. I was supposed to run for 2 hours and 10 minutes on Friday. There was no way I could do that. I felt horrible and couldn't bear the thought of running. She said ZERO. Amen. I liked it. I thought she would say 6 or 8 miles. I didn't like missing a workout but this time around I didn't care. My body was achy. My scalp was even sore when I touched my head. Friday afternoon was worse. We had a conference call and I would have to walk out of the conference room when I had to sneeze and blow my nose. I sneezed like a man.... so loud.... I left even before the call ended. Jen and Matt were on the call anyway. I went to Walgreen. It's been a while since I bought cold medication. Finally I bought sinus and allergy med even though it wasn't allergy. The symptoms were the same... runny nose, nasal congestion, sneezing. That was what I needed.

I went home and tried to sleep. I didn't know if I could do an open water swim the next day. That was another thing... We were planning to go to Lake Lanier to do the first open water swim. The water temp was around 63F. I didn't think it was a good idea to swim in cold water while having a cold. I decided to wait until the next morning before I made a decision.

I woke up around 6AM. As soon as I opened my eyes, I was analyzing my body.... any chest congestion? nope. nasal congestion? a little. runny nose? nope. I felt much better than the night before. I got ready and ate my breakfast. We had to swim for 50 minutes. If I felt horrible, my plan B was to swim less than that. It was actually not only open water swim, we would practice transition to bike and then to run as well. Oh by the way... did I mention that I had the biggest canker sore ever? The diameter was 1/3 of an inch. No kidding. It hurt like crazy when I put Albothyl, but after that, it went numb for a few hours.

After a quick warm up, we started the continuous swim. The water felt good. It was so different swimming with a long sleeve wetsuit. I breathed every two strokes and sighted every 6-8 strokes. I went pretty easy. I thought about the swim video. I drove me crazy that my right arm was doing what it wasn't supposed to be doing. It actually helped thinking about it to kill time and helped me concentrate on my stroke... not what's at the bottom of the lake. I could freak myself out when I didn't see other people swimming around me.

John, Susan, me, Sarah and Eric

Mary brought her 9 month old German Shepperd puppy with her, Lucinda. Lu learned to swim that morning. It was funny to see her doggie paddle. It was a pretty good day overall. I suffered a little bit after I got home. My body was a little angry after the swim, but I was pretty confident that I could ride 60 miles tomorrow. Maybe slow but as long as I logged the miles in, I would be okay.