On my Myspace ... feels weird to type that ... anyway, there's a 'status/mood' bar where you can type a sentence about what's up ... and pick how you might be feeling (grumpy, hungry, ecstatic, crunchy).
Occasionally, I update mine, sometimes with some glee or glum about writing ... but more often I type in what's happening in my other life, the aquatic one.
A few weeks ago, I typed in "I whacked my heel flip-turning," and my mood was "pissed off."
Um, I never got that phrase either. If you think about it, 'pissed off' doesn't really mean anything. I mean, I get the 'pissed' part ... and I know what 'off means' - (that stuff that you spray on skeeters, right?) ... but these two words put together just don't make sense.
Anyway, some of my 'friends' remarked on my status, and I got a few, "poor baby's" and "ouch" and other little missives.
Last Wednesday, I typed, "swam 3.2 miles" and my mood was 'sore.' Some people commented on this.
So I thought I'd blog on the whole thing and say what's going on with me in the pool.
When I was younger, I was up for playing just about any sport, baseball, basketball, raquetball, tennis, karate, volleyball... and, well, I'm not going to be modest. I got pretty good at most of them. I have my share of track ribbons and medals, softball trophies and a black belt in karate. Though, for the record, I suck at golf, bowling, archery and the pink - Arts Entertainment - topic in Trivia Pursuit.
But as I got closer to fifty ... just four months away now... I had to drop these kind of sports, so I pulled out an old favorite. I started swimming ... a lot. I joined Masters Swimming, and swam my first ever competitive race when I was forty.
I don't swim much compared to, say, a high school varsity swimmer. Those crazy mermen and mermaids swim about ten thousand yards every day. I'm not quite as fast as the varsity, but I can smoke most of the JV. And I can still swim a hundred yards in less than a minute. Not all that shabby for a geezer.
I negotiated three swim days a week with my wife, but make up for the lower number by swimming four thousand yards of interval training. Interval training is when you break up the swim into sets, two hundred yards, one hundred yards, some pull-buoy, some kicks, maybe some synchronized swimming ... heh ...etc.
Now let's talk about what four thousand yards really means. It's a shade under two and a half miles ... or forty football field lengths. Forty!
And I swim it in about an hour and ten minutes.
In a usual month, I might swim twenty to twenty-five miles, and my goal is to hit two hundred fifty miles this year, a nice increase over last year. So about ten days ago I realized that I hadn't missed any nights, and I was going to get pretty close to thirty-one miles in July, which would mean that I averaged a mile a day swimming for the month.
I decided to go for it.
My wife said I could swim an extra day or two, but I decided just to crank up the mileage a bit, hence the 3.2 miles last Wednesday, duplicated two days later. This made up the slack, and all I needed was to do my normal swim today and Wednesday.
I swam my four thousand today, which leaves just one mile to go. I'm actually going to over shoot my goal a bit, but so what? Always better to go too far than not far enough.
And like I said, all this just four months before I turn fifty. Woo-hoo!
So that's what all of the updates and swimming moods are all about.
See ya and stuff,
Norm
www.normcowie.com
The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably)
The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness
The Heat of the Moment
Fang Face (YA vampire/humor - coming Aug. 09)
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