Personal Swim Training - Apr 20

I had planned to go out swimming with Bora today at the Lifetime Fitness out in Troy, so we started the day with a brunch at one of these hole in the wall places that Bora has discovered, which had delicious food!! Those banana pancakes were sooo amazing, that I just could not put my fork down!! :)

Anyways, I wasn't too sure how much swimming I was going to get done with all that food in me, but we headed out nonetheless. The plan was to swim and eventually head out to Kensington for the bike training at 6 pm.

We arrived at Lifetime and started off with a 10 min warmup on the elliptical, which was frankly a good idea to get the pancakes in a reasonable format in my stomach to be able to get past the rest of the session. The warmup was definitely refreshing, and helped gear me up for our strength workout session. While I was feeling very confident about doing weights, I was not quite ready for the kind of training Bora is accustomed to! The session went well for him, with me struggling to keep up, and eventually I just had to call it quits and just watch him do it. I will admit, that my body got quite the workout from what we did do, because I was starting to feel muscles that I was not aware were there in my body lately.

I was wondering how I was going to be able to swim after this session, but Bora seemed firm that we could do it, so sharing his optimism, we changed and started off with a 200 yd warmup to get the blood flowing and body accustomed to the water. The intent was to do a complete 0.9 mile run (66 lengths). This seemed a tall order given the current condition of my system, but then again, "no guts no glory"!

I started out with a steady pace, keeping in mind that wasting too much energy will not help me in the actual race by gaining a couple of minutes. Bora had a slightly faster pace than me and ended up lapping me 5 times before he completed. I was tired, but not cramping during the entire session, so after completing the 5 laps, I was only 4 minutes behind Bora, which in my books is quite an acheivement!!

The toughest part was getting out of the pool, with my legs threatening to cramp up on me, but somehow I managed to kind of slide out and breaking the water tension without the legs taking a beating. I felt like I had accomplished a feat I was not aware I was capable of, and the fact that my time was not too far off from our swim training trials, gave me hope that I was fairly consistent.

You would think that after all this activity, we would be ready to call it quits. Well, you will be sorely disappointed, because we found a few racquetball courts empty, and I just happened to have a couple of racquets in the car handy! Now Bora is a newbie at this sport, but I was quite amazed on how quickly he picked up the game, and we ended up playing for 45 mins, before the place was becoming a pool of sweat. I think combined, we must have burnt a minimum of 2000 calories per person during our entire exercise routine which lasted nearly 3 hours!!!

I know I am going to sleep like a log tonight, and so glad that I will be hitting the bed at 8 pm!! ;)