Swimming and Pushing

This morning I made up my "missed" swim from yesterday (on account of another High School meet bouncing me from my usual lunch time sojourn). I was a little late leaving the house, but managed to bike to the pool by about 8:15. I was on deck five minutes later and ready to go. On Friday mornings only half the pool is open for drop-in lane swimming and the "fast" lane had six other people in it. The other half of the pool I can only assume is reserved for the UofT swim team, but today it was totally empty. Navigating the other swimmers was going to be a challenge also since a couple seemed to be pretty quick and the others slower than me. In the end this was not much of an issue since I could only manage 200m at a time before my shoulders screamed for rest, and that allowed me to let the faster folks pass and to find a suitable spot to start again on another 200. I think the chin ups from last night were the reason for my shoulder fatigue, but I was not expecting this at all! I managed 10X200m in 35 minutes and made it to work a bit late, but glad to have gotten the workout in.

When I arrived, my manager dropped by my desk and gave me his extra copy of Run Less, Run Faster, which was very cool. I read this book a few months ago, and now have a copy of my own to follow throughout 2009. As good as that is, it does have me thinking of some goals for the year, the first of which is to try and get my 10k under 42 minutes so that I can dream about achieving a BQ time in the marathon of 3:15. Yeah right! The book does state that that's the equivalent time for the marathon distance, but my body may have something else to say about the whole thing. For the time being I am committed to taking the rest of the year off and waiting two weeks after my foot is completely pain free before starting to run again.

Tonight we watched Monsters Inc. with the boys, and I snuck off to do my push ups and catch the end of the Raptors game on TV. The Raptors are looking OK this year, though they are continuing their historic pattern of win a few lose a few, never stringing more than three or four wins together at a time. Chris Bosh is playing like an MVP, but I'm worried that the extra minutes he seems to be playing just to keep the team around .500 will result in injury as they did every other year he's been asked to play this much.

On the push up front I completed Day 3 of Week 4 of the hundred push up challenge thusly: 29-33-29-29 and maxed out at 50 for a total of 170. I'm definitely feeling stronger with this program, and am quite confident that I'll be able to do 100 in a row by Christmas. The question that comes to mind is will I be able to keep it going afterwards? Not to do more than a hundred, but to maintain that level of strength. It seems easier somehow to work towards a goal rather that aimlessly "working out"...