1/2 an Hour After Eating

I added swimming to my routine today. I was inspired by Michael Phelps and Dara Torres. They make it look easy. I figured I would just swim slower like I do with the running. I run the same as the Olympians they just do it faster. Swimming doesn’t seem to work that way. I jumped into the pool at the Y. It’s twenty-five meters long, which is half of what’s seen on television. I planned to do ten laps, minimum. I’m in pretty good shape. I can run pretty far pretty fast. I found out during lap two that I can’t swim very far or very fast. The first lap went swimmingly. The Australian Crawl is my stroke – Freestyle to the uninitiated – because the backstroke is for old women and the breaststroke and butterfly are flat out retarded outside of a swim meet. I was feeling so good that I thought about doing a flip turn to impress the hottie lifeguard with jewelry in her face. I’ve never done a flip turn, and in a freak occurrence good sense won out and I still haven’t. When I run my body handles the breathing. I don’t have to think about it. With swimming the breathing is “hands on” the whole time. I hadn’t really thought about this until I was half way through lap two. I didn’t get my face far enough out of the water, and a mouth full of water isn’t useful when one is trying to gasp. It’s funny how quickly panic can set in, and while I felt a surge of adrenaline, it didn’t seem to help me get any closer to the wall. I did make it to the wall without looking too stupid but I did decide that a full fifty meters was way too far to swim all at once. I finished my swim one lap at a time with a break in between each to catch my breath. I even started to figure out how my stroke actually works. I swam for about a half hour including my breaks, and I was more spent than after a session of weights and an hour of cardio. My feet didn’t hurt. I wasn’t drenched in sweat. And I’m thinking about getting rid of all my body hair. So MJ, if you come home and find me booty naked, covered in Nair it’s because the London games are only four years away.