My longest swim ever

So this morning, I decided I was going to go straight to the pool.

However, my class is at 7 a.m. - and that's way late to be just STARTING a workout on a weekday morning! So at first I thought I'd obey my schedule and do 1:15 of swimming, which would mean starting at 6:45 and doing class for an hour.

Well, traffic was light, so I got to the pool at 6:25. I thought about doing something else first...and then decided: wouldn't it be fun to swim 4,000 yards today?

Answer: Yeah, actually. Kind of. (THANK GOODNESS for my SwiMp3!)

So I did 1500 before class, then 2500 in class. The 2500 included three 100's at T-pace, but I'm not sure if I improved over last month because I was so intent on completing the 2500 that I didn't get out of the pool right at 8 a.m. when the instructor was giving out our times, and by the time I was out of the pool, he was gone.

That was the longest I've ever swum. I think I did 3100 one day last week, and prior to this swim, that had been my longest. My actual swim time was about 1:35 when you take out rest times; but the 1:35 includes drills, and I'm massively slower on some of the drills than I am just swimming. Not that I'm particularly fast when I swim, though.

What I learned today was that I pretty much could keep swimming all day. My arms felt kind of tired around 3,000 yards, so I compensated by slowing down a little and ensuring I had good form. I told myself if my form got too sloppy, I would get out of the pool at once. There's no reason to risk injury this early in the season. But honestly, I was fine - and more bored than anything else.

I thought my arms would hurt for the rest of the day, while doing normal things like brushing my hair or typing. But they didn't. We'll see how they respond to my strength training tomorrow, though...I bet they won't be psyched.

At lunch time, it was intense bike ride day. Unfortunately, I got the start time wrong for the Cascade group ride, and since I got it wrong and Danielle had met me at my office to ride with me, we opted to ride just the two of us and not wait half an hour for the group's start time. And it was good - we did a kick-ass hill that I've done a couple of times before, and a new hill I've been eyeing for a while. I expected the new hill to be hard. It actually wasn't. And I held 23 mph on a flat part of our route for as long as we were on the road. Fortunately for me, it was only a mile or so.

So I planned a CRAZY route for Saturday's ride, full of killer hills. I CAN'T WAIT! Am I insane?