Apart from a few sweltering days, the weather has been mostly cooperative for some good outdoors summer adventure. Of course, my return to the pool has meant that I have exerted quite a bit of that sweat equity back into a refreshing laps at the local pool where my rec pass is grinding out the milage.

The last few days I logged…

After swimming on Tuesday morning, I got it into my head that I should go back later that afternoon to reaquaint myself with the strength equipment at the gym. Mid-afternoon in the summer holiday season was not ideal for this, but I did get a full lap of sets done while tripping over the hoards of gym-rat boys hogging the equipment and taking selfies. But after sufficient reps I came up with a kind of quantitative measure for overall effort distilled as a single number—y’know, for my spreadsheet—that summarizes how much strength work I did. It’s not magic, but it gives me something to chart.

The heat subsided on briefly on Wednesday evening and that brought out a respectable crew to the run club at the store.  Our regular group leader was sick, so I helped pinch hit and led the front of the group while KB, the manager took over and pushed from the back. She was tapering for a fifty miler this weekend, so didn’t want to be pushing it near the head even just for a seven klick run around the neighbourhood.

I was back at the pool the next morning, dutifully doubling my distance over my introductory session just two days prior. That was almost off the table entirly because even as I was crawling into bed the night before my arms were raging with exertion pains and I had to take something even just to get comfortable to sleep—which I did, and felt well enough to log five hundred meters worth of laps Thursday morning before coffee.

I here use the words “guilted” and “motivated” interchangably. Either one, I found myself organizing our regular Thursday evening running adventure, sans adventure, with just a regular meetup at the Mill Creek starting point. Most of the crew was getting ready for a road trip down south to the S7 Ultramarathon so anything too extreme and ankle-twisting was off the table. 

I rested until Sunday morning and when no one else showed up for our standard run, I swapped my track shorts for swim trunks and logged yet another increment upwards in my watery distances.  I have been building with the goal of hitting a respectable time & distance combination that makes a punch on the swim pass card worthwhile, and right now 800m in a little under 25 minutes seems to fit the bill.

I repeated that swimming distance this morning, Tuesday, and my goal for the day is an exercise triathlon: I swam this morning, biked to the cafe to write this post, and will go for a run later this morning. Details on that to follow.