Mile-Stones

I reached a major milestone today in my swimming - I finally covered one mile. In my pool, one mile is 72 lengths and I managed to drag myself about 76 lengths. It took an hour, but I felt pretty good the entire time even though I'm still taking a lot of breaks. I think I'm ready to push past the breaks and try for more consecutive laps with smaller rests in between sets. I just have to keep taking it one day at a time since this was still only my 14th swim ever. I'm just happy to have gotten this far so quickly.

Even though it rated as a good swim, I did have to suffer some more indignity. The pool is always crowded on Tuesdays so sharing a lane is a certainty. My lane mate left about 20 minutes after I started and for a brief time, I got it all to myself. But then, worse than the rippling-muscle-speedo guy from a couple weeks ago, the female lifeguard joined me. I've seen her swim before so I was immediately mortified. She got in and tore up our lane, totally putting me to shame and making me more conscious of my every move than before. She is extremely fast so she did her swim and got out. But then, to layer on more suffering, she sat on the dive platform at the end of our lane and chatted with - who else - the rippling-muscle-speedo guy who just happened to be in the next lane over! But once again, I was selected for the share instead of him, even though they are clearly friendly, because I am the slow, sad swimmer that makes the perfect lane mate. I hope she at least noticed my massive improvement since first coming to the pool on May 19.

Since I couldn't get in a real ride today, I hopped on the trainer after dinner for a one-hour ride. I can never bike as fast on the trainer as I can outside, but the effort always feels incredibly hard because I'm constantly pedaling. Even though I've gotten better at not coasting when outside, you still get the help of downhills and varied terrain that makes it feel different. But the hardest part of riding on the trainer for me is the boredom. An hour is usually my limit. I got in a little over 12 miles and called it a night.

I'm not working tomorrow so I'm hoping to get in a good training day. I'll wait and see what sounds good in the morning.

Sport - Swimming
Distance - 1800 yards (1645 meters or 1.02 miles)
Time - 1:00:00

Sport - Biking (on trainer)
Distance - 12.63 miles
Time - 1:00:00