Taking the Reins

Yup, I’m finally there.  I’m THAT girl in the pool that is purposeful!  I’m not just breastroking from side to side with no plan. I’m not sprinting for 50 yards only to ruin my endurance for the entire workout.  Heck, I HAVE a workout.  I even have a little pull buoy with my name on it that I take with me, along with my workout in a plastic baggie to read.  I’ve arrived!

You may laugh, but I’ve always felt out of place at the gym’s pool.  I never used to be able to swim continuously for very long, and I was just awkward in the water, despite growing up on the swim team.  I hated being seen in my bathing suit and didn’t even know how to get into my swim cap properly. But over the past few weeks, something has clicked and I *love* swimming.  Did everyone catch that?  This is momentous.  I love it!  It’s so invigorating, yet relaxing.  Had a fantabulous time at the pool this morning while hubby studied for his interview back at home.  A couple hundred meters of warm up, so catch-up and high elbow drills and pulls, then did a timed 800 meter to use as a baseline for the next 8 weeks.  (That’s all I have until the race now– 8 weeks!!)  I actually did the 800 meters in 16 minutes, so I was amazingly proud of myself.  Had lots left in the tank, which is what coach wants, and actually wanted to do more!  But this is “honor thy body” week and tomorrow coach is going to slaughter us in our bike/run practice, so I used my brain and did a few sprints afterwards followed by some easy drills and a cool-down.  Lasted 40 minutes, and I was just so confident!  There were guys coming in next to me and trying to keep up (please, I’m doing a longer distance swim here– like I’m going to race you down the lane when I have 16 more to go!), and women who’d jump in and swim for two minutes and then leave….and I just felt awesome.

Anyway, I highly, highly recommend swimming.  Pull up some beginner workouts off the internet and jump right in– low impact on the knees, and just so relaxing.

I plugged my swim into my Sparkpeople activity log and was pretty proud of the results.  Here’s my activity for the week:

Sparkpeople calculates calories burned based on the age and weight you enter (I think I’m still there at 148 lbs, so I’m probably burning a little more than this), and the activity.  It actually gets pretty specific, including different swim strokes and different running paces.  So I really like it, as I use it as a baseline for determining my activity points…..medium and high exertion just don’t work for me on the WW sliding scale, so it’s helpful to get a better numerical idea of calories burned.  I try to eat half, as my regular WW points equate to anywhere from 1050 to 1300 calories per day, and every nutritionist I’ve met has said that is too low when working out.  (I think I probably eat 1500-1600 now, which I think is more than enough?)  Anyway, wanted to add this.  I love seeing my activity, and this shows me I’m not over-exerting too early!  I’ll leave August to the twice a day workouts.

Here’s my eating so far today.  Here’s hoping it’s better than yesterday.  I wrote about it on Blogspot, but I’m too ashamed to post it here: