The force of habit

Habits can be a good thing. Several times force of habit has got me going on a workout. But today my habits lead me astray. Either that or I wasn't awake yet.

In some pools they ask people to swim in circles so that people on each side of the lane rope are going the same way. In practical terms it means that one lane swims keep right, while the next one swims keep left. The idea is to reduce the number of chances of rapping knuckles with people swimming in the opposite direction.

It works great as long as you remember which way you're going, and this morning I didn't. I ended up sharing a lane with a sloppy swimmer. He let me pass on the first lap, swimming keep left. As I got back to the end I started from I flipped, and started swimming back keeping RIGHT. Oops. The guy coming and I saw each other in time to avoid bumping which is good. I'm still asleep, and it took me a few seconds to realize what was what, and by then he said he didn't want to talk about it, and wandered off to another lane. About then I figured it out, and I would have apologized but he was going and didn't want to talk to me. I felt kind of bad about that because he was right, and I was wrong. He had every reason to believe that we were all sorted on our swim direction and I goofed. He complained to a lifeguard about it, which puzzled her because by then I was back in the pattern. She talked to me later and I explained.

Even so it turned out to be a pretty good swim. 1.5 hrs with lots of kick drill, some with fins, some without. I really need to work on this. I kick from the hips like they say, nice and tight, but I don't really go anywhere. I see other people kicking and it's like they've got an outboard motor powering them along. After the swim about 15 minutes of water running.

Later in the evening 45 minutes of core. A blog buddy has started a crunch challenge, 300 per day till mid Jan. Another blog buddy recently completed the 200 squats challenge. I suck at push ups and plank, so I want to work on those. So here's tonight's numbers.
Crunches 3x100=300
Squats 50
Pushups 8 (we're talking slow with good form, not whambamthankyoumaam.
Plank 60 seconds. Plank right after crunches probably isn't the best possible order.

And since I've done a couple shout outs, here's one for Neil who's running a Gu contest on his blog.