Of laps and lunatic cats
This week I started following an 8-week beginner sprint triathlon plan I downloaded from AllTriathlon (thanks to a tip from Lara who is always full of good suggestions).
Yesterday had me swimming, which I haven't done in a while. I'd forgotten how insecure I am about swimming. I always seem to get in the water and overanalyze every single thing I'm doing.
I'd never much thought about my freestyle stroke until last summer, when the Danskin training group I belonged to was coached a few times by a Masters swimmer. Every time the coach watched me swim she would get a rather perplexed look on her face -- I was doing something wrong, but she couldn't quite figure out what it was. She told me that I wasn't using my upper body strength enough, that when the other women stroked, they noticeably moved forward in the water, almost jerked forward, but on each of my hand strokes there was little indication that there was any power behind the movement. I also didn’t kick enough or hard enough.
So now I have a complex about my swimming being rather like a leisurely, aimless stroll in the park, rather than a determined powerwalk by someone with a definite destination.
Here are the last few days worth of exercise:
Friday: biking, 8 miles
Saturday: biking, 28 miles (jaunt to housewarming party, so this ride featured a feast mid-trip)
Sunday: biking, 13.5 miles
Monday: walking, 4,000 steps; running, 40 minutes
Tuesday: biking, 10 miles; swimming, 500 yards (20 laps)
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Finally, I need cat advice. See this cat?:
See that sneer, the mocking slitting of the eyes? That's an indication of deep psychological problems. This cat is the spawn of the devil, sent down to earth by an evil force bent on driving me mad. Mad, I say! I inherited this cat from sister about 7 months ago. She's fixed. She has got to be the most vocal cat every spawned by demonic forces. She won't shut-up. Ever! She cries and moans and cries some more despite the fact that she's petted, fed and watered regularly. She wants to go inside, she wants to go outside, she wants to inside, ad nauseum. Every single evening she climbs the tree outside my window and then starts caterwauling at 11 p.m. and again at 1 a.m. and again at 4 a.m. because she can't come down unless I go stand under the tree in my pyjamas and coax her down. Sometimes I want to wring her little neck and pop her head off she's so irritating.
Please.
If anyone can help me figure out why she won't shut her maw, I'd be eternally grateful.
6 Comments:
What a great week! It's motivated me to go drag my rickety-ass bike out of the basement, though it has NOT motivated me to dip even one single toe in the water.
As for the cat, I have no advice but you are right about that picture - the is the biggest eff-you look I've ever seen on a cat!
You've got to love rides that include mid-ride food stops.
As far as the cat goes? I've got one that looks just like yours, and as far as I can tell, everything you described is completely normal. Has yours had the inside midnight crazies yet? Just kind of randomly starts running around without any real discernable pattern? Or randomly attacks your feet when you move in your sleep?
whats up megan! looks like some awesome exercise there. hey don't leave yer email address so i can't respond to your comments :) you were right on with the pancakes being on the corporate dime but i still felt a little guilty not being able to eat them all. man were they good. oh yeah on the dry cleaning thing...i do that once in a while but it gets kind of expensive. i think its $3 per shirt plus tax? bummer. pants are more like $6. i think they actually just "launder" the shirts like normal but the pants are dry cleaned which means somehow they don't actually put them in a washing machine to clean them. although i'm not sure how they do that exactly. its a mystery! :)
Um... I detect neither sneer nor demonic leer. It looks like she was caught in mid-blink by a flashing camera. I must say she has you very well trained. You come to the door on command, you venture outdoors on command, you provide drippy faucet on demand. I suggest a pair of earplugs and a firmer hand with establishing boundaries. :)
do you swoop your hand through the water in a sort of S-curve at the side of your body? (i'm sure if you don't, she would have noticed, but maybe not...) once i learned this, my stoke became much more powerful. the idea is that you move your hand so that you're always pushing water that's not already moving. does that make sense?
I don't know what to tell you about the swimming. You rock, of course, for doing it. I'm a rotten swimmer, though I love doing it. But I have a fear of tri, mostly because I think it will make me love swimming much less.
Cats. Sigh. There is nothing you can do. All three of the indoor cats here are talkers, the outdoor cat less so, and since we don't let them out, there's none of this serenading from trees bs. And we're really lucky because none of them wake us up to talk, but the middle of the night if you stray to the bathroom, Nigella will tell you in no certain terms how she's not happy with the sleeping situation. There is nothing you can do beyond deciding that you are a cat slave, or that this one is too annoying for words.
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