Saturday afternoon

I got up promptly this morning and began racking the leaves.  Second rake of the season.  I cleared all the difficult corners, the fence line between the homes, the part with the bushes that seem to collect leaves as if they have some value.  Every nook and cranny was spotless.  I even swept the driveway, as if it was a race so as to raise my pulse, secretly laughing at those overweight Americans with gasoline powered leaf blowers.  With my work completed I ran a few errands, and upon return the yard was covered with leaves once again.  My nine mature oak trees are the Ironmen of the plant kingdom.  They're endurance athletes in their own right.

I took the dog for a run.  One lap at Foster, like clockwork.  He pulled and tugged and chased squirrels.  I stopped once and got down eye to eye with him to really emphasize the point that I want to make: "stay with me".  He looked nervous and confused, eyes darting side to side, ears down.  Oh well - we ran on and the tugging ensued.  This was my first run since the marathon.  Took a week of running off.  It was like heaven.

I swam a few nights ago, late, at Jorgenson.  I was the only guy in the pool, which I love.  It helps to focus on the bubbles, as there were not anyone else's bubbles to interfere with my bubbles.  How much air you 'catch' in the pull phase of the stroke can be telling.  Swimming in crystal clean calm water is good when you really want to think about what your body is doing in the water.  I'm getting quite good at pushing through two strong dolphin kicks off the turn during freestyle - this being something that Phelps really introduced, although it was done before him.  It's hard.  You need oxygen usually fairly soon after the turn, so to stay under and kick using your whole body takes some discipline.  I can't even really remember what my workout was - but I did do a set of five 100 IM's, held 1:15-1:20's.  If I could only swim breast stroke.  Breast stroke is kind of like running to me.  It's the one when you look like a frog.  It's really dumb, the pull doesn't do much, the kick puts weird torque on your knees and hips, you have to bob up out of the water to breath.  I would have been a fairly decent IM'er had I been able to perform the breast stroke with more efficiency.  And the name 'breast' stroke.  Sure it made for good juvenile jokes in high school and college but really, I mean, it should be called the frog bob, or the knee breaker.  My apologies to Makstenieks...he sure could swim it.