(AWOL)

Woke up this morning with much phlegm in lungs telling me that double spin class with time in zone 3 had perhaps been slightly premature! Decided to postpone run till tomorrow.

Non-triaspirational but on the whole enjoyable day - among other things I had a really fantastic Alexander Technique lesson. I am looking into this for general insomnia, anxiety, breathing reasons, but it is going to be really useful for triathlon also: the questions of body awareness and relaxation are highly apt for run and swim form, not to mention cycling which is by far the most tension-producing of the three sports (for me in particular, but probably in general).

I would not say that I am a natural as far as the question of body awareness goes, I am more of a mind person than a body person when it comes down to it and tend to hold myself in a fairly tense way (to the extent that this is an amazingly consistent weakness across all sorts of activities, from how I used to hold my hands when I played the oboe to my difficulty maintaining a nice floppy high-elbow position on freestyle recovery), but I've been thinking about it very obsessively in context of swimming and Iyengar yoga for some years now, and also was interested for a long time in both the practical and theoretical sense in teenage years from the point of view of singing, acting and playing wind instruments - I am surprised (in a good way) to find that I do understand and pick this sort of thing up fairly quickly. One of the highest compliments I have been paid in recent years was JB commenting during a lesson on butterfly that I was a fast learner! It is only possible to be a fast learner with a good teacher, though, and I am thinking that this one is going to be as good as JB only in a different sphere of expertise.