I love starting early on Monday morning. By 7:45, I am already home, and have accomplished my work-out goals for the day: today I swam 2km, and then ran 6km at a steady, 5km pace--fast for me, though I felt good and pushed the last 500m even faster, ending in a sprint. I probably looked insane on that track. There are usually no more than two or three joggers, and a whole lot of senior citizens out for a stroll. This morning, the sun was coming up, and the light was lovely.
The pool is becoming my friend. The water feels less and less like a foreign and dangerous element (though I realize it could still be that, given the circumstances). I am swimming faster. My technique must be improving (my positioning in the water feels more stream-lined; there were laps this morning when my body felt incredibly buoyant). But this means that I need to figure out how to pace myself in the water. Before, I was--without exaggeration--swimming exactly as fast I possibly could. It didn't matter whether I kicked harder or spun my arms faster, I simply could not drag myself from one end to the other any more quickly. But now I can. And I just about wore myself out with the excitement of it in the first twenty minutes. I went for 50 minutes, and probably slowed down a bit during the second half.
When I think of how it felt to swim when I started in January, I'm darn near thrilled by my progress. I no longer rest at the ends. I know how to get my goggles to stick before jumping into the water. I'm completely comfortable breathing every three strokes, using alternate sides (so comfortable that today I didn't even use the every-other stroke--I didn't even think of using it, actually). I can swim further, and get there faster. My endurance is higher, too. The girl in my lane used to lap me at least every 200m, and today she just didn't. (Okay, she lapped me a couple of times ... but I passed her, too, on her short rest breaks--which look quite appealing, actually--she builds them into her swim).
The run afterward was not what I felt like doing, but as I said to my friend, "The faster I go, the faster I'm done." That's my philosophy for these Monday morning runs. I felt the potential within me to go even faster for the 5km, and to keep the pace going even longer; that's why I went an extra kilometer. I still haven't worked up by weekly increments to 10km at the 5-minute pace, as planned, but I imagine it will possible. It will probably also be painful. That's the thing nobody mentions. Part of what gets built, when adding endurance, is a tolerance to pain, or a willingness to push harder and to know that it's temporary. "Giving it your all" means you're spent at the end, and it hurts to spend all of yourself on a task, no matter what the task is.
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