Monday, September 2, 2013

Floating, Yes. Actual swimming, somewhat

The Talisman pool is open, at last. It's a mood experience now. Normally it's brilliantly lighted, with additional sunshine coming in through the big windows of the training pool.

Now the lights are out on the competition pool. There are panels to herd you directly from the locker rooms to the training pool. It feels very unusual. They think the competition pool will open in another month, and in the mean time there won't be much solo lane swimming.

It was so nice to get back into the water. It's been more than two months for me. I was pleased to find that my stroke is rusty but serviceable, leading to lap times just a bit slower than what I'm used to. Just not very many laps. 250 m and my arms were ready to fall off. I switched to dolphin kick (with fins of course) and settled into 100 m kick, 100 m swim, alternating between front and back on the kick. That felt pretty good.

With her usual good timing my buddy Katie showed up for water running. I was happy to join her and give my arms a rest. We had a wonderful chat getting caught up. Overall I swam a bit less than 30 minutes, and water ran maybe an hour and 15 minutes or so. Once I got out on deck again I felt heavy.

Being in the water did a world of good for my legs, and for me in general. I've always liked being in the water. It's very soothing to feel it flow past your body, and it works your whole body in ways that running or biking don't. I'm looking forward to swimming lots over the fall as I try to get back into shape.

The rest of our day was a nice drive in the country to Dewinton and Black Diamond. I'm still cleaning up my blog from all the drool you guys left behind the description of the bison, so I won't discuss the chicken dinner tonight. It's been a wonderful long weekend here, 4 days of relaxing and puttering about. Hope yours was just as nice!

And yes, my blog roll has changed a bit. Thank you for noticing. My process as I discover blogs is to add them to an evaluation bookmark folder. After a while, if they stay current, and more importantly, continue to interest me, eventually they make the big time. Meaning my blog roll. There have been a few fitness blogs added, but there have also been some writing related blogs as well, and a couple of political blogs have probably snuck in. You can see the latest 25 shown, and more appear if you click the little show all button.

Some people break up their blog roll into different sections. One I follow has several sections. I've been musing about this for a while, and am interested in your feedback about this. Do you follow blogs by topic, and wish all the riffraff (as defined by you) would get sorted out of my blog? Do you like one longish list because it's easy to see when your favourite blog (after mine, of course) is updated? Feel free to comment.

A few have disappeared off the bottom. If someone hasn't updated for a long time, I assume they have moved on to other things that amuse them more. I wish them well, and hope they have fun. As the saying goes, so long and thanks for all the fish.

In a bit of foreshadowing, tomorrow my world changes. Look for an evocative blog title.

2 comments:

  1. Wow. I feel honoured to still be on the list. Been thinking of redoing my blog roll too but am not sure how to tackle it. I like the way Janet has her organized by topic but I'm not sure I have the energy to maintain one like it and, truthfully, I don't read a lot of blogs regularly - though I'm working on that. It's nice meeting new people and (virtually) becoming part of new communities, and it's often inspiring reading about what other runners/writer/travelers are up to. Swimming - haven't been in a pool for years but I used to love it. During my years at Acadia, I regularly swam 40-50 laps at lunch time. It was the only other time in my life I ever felt remotely athletic. Anyway, glad you had a good long weekend, Keith, and look forward to the big reveal tomorrow!

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    1. Janet is the example I was thinking of. In one sense I really like that, since I sometimes read blogs by mood, and the sorting makes it easy. But it is a bit more work to set up, and some blogs are hard to categorize. Like mine. So mainly because I'm lazy, I'll probably leave it like it is, and let people discover the new ones.

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