Pre-race swim

I ended up taking yesterday off; a favorite person of mine was in town for a brief visit, and as Wendy says, people we care about matter more than workouts...

So I thought it better not to run today, but I couldn't bear the idea of not having at least a little swim, so I just had it and it was a good thing, I think. (Maybe it will make me sleep better?)

I did a slightly pointless but enjoyable set of 2 x 500 pull, to save my legs (it occurred to me near the end of this that I could have used this opportunity to practice breathing on the side I do not like, or at least bilaterally--next time...). Then I did 100 breast and 100 back, but I could not see how to do more breast without using up leg muscle I need for tomorrow and the back was a hazard to the other people in the lane--unusually, it was not so much a case of me having lane rage as the haplessness of the others making them a danger to themselves, it is not a good idea to stop for a rest right at the end of the lane when someone is charging up to you on their back! Arghh...

(The workout I missed yesterday was going to be two treadmill miles and then half an hour easy swim, with 2 x 100 each of breast and back. For some reason--taper?--I was totally obsessing all day Wed. and Thurs. re: what to wear and how to organize it so as to do it most economically--would I be coming from this talk, or from some other event, and what did I need to have in my bag and what could I wear underneath work-suitable garb? If I wore the two-piece triathlon bathing suit that I never wear as underwear, could I run with that and then just strip off outside layers for swim? But I did not get a chance to practice any of it, though I did have many reflections on bathing suits--I am too lazy to link to them all--but my main observation is that I have bought a number of suits that turned out to be fairly useless--for instance no point having a triathlon 2-piece suit with a bikini-type bottom because when am I going to be riding my bike in a race with what are basically just underpants on?!? And also that Tyr suits are much nicer than Speedo, but that one of the kinds of Tyr suit is much preferable to the other, but the categories were not conceptually clear to me till AFTER I had ordered several of the wrong kind online. And also that much as I prefer doing ALL shopping online, it is not really a good idea for bathing suits. I think it is that the diamondback is preferable to the maxback--looking at the pictures, you might think it would be the other way round, but the one with the narrow straps and straight-across top gives much better support in the chest area than the one with fuller shoulder-and-chest area coverage.)

Taper is annoying! I'm really looking forward to this half-marathon tomorrow (report will follow on the other blog, I'll link here though), but I wish I'd been able to swim more this week. The CU morning swim was on hiatus, so I wasn't missing actual workouts, but I have a lesson tomorrow afternoon and it's pitiful how little I've practiced. And yoga class on Wednesday was very useful but hardly in the spirit of taper either, various muscles were incredibly sore yesterday and I can still feel 'em today!

(We were working very hard on one quite precise thing, for about forty minutes, and at the end various muscles were just trembling with tiredness--it's really the only thing I do that pushes this hard, even a strenuous gym workout does not produce quite the same feeling. Basically after doing some triangle pose in various ways we were working on Warrior II in order to get the right feel in the buttock and thigh--we "angled" it, which involves putting the front foot right at the front of the mat and keeping the other where it would usually be and then REALLY and intensively concentrating on getting the flesh of the buttock to pull down and the proper roll of the thigh outward--sounds minor but it's totally intense...)