Sushi Fueled!

I've had to move a few workouts around this week thanks to a few commitments, so that meant getting a run in today over lunch. I had a 64 minute run with 3 x 10:00 steady state intervals. I didn't double check that I had the right workout in my Garmin last night, so once I finally caught a signal and checked things out...oops! The steady state run I had in the Garmin was based on heart rate zones and was probably a 2 hour run. Nothing a few beeps of a button couldn't fix.

I started out on my 20 minute warm up and was feeling good until about 15 minutes in. All of a sudden my legs were tired!! They came around in time for the first interval and then I never had to worry about my pace for the rest of the run. It felt amazing! I wound up with 6.62 mi in 65 minutes.

I met a girlfriend for dinner at my favorite sushi joint, Globefish. We had some amazing sushi and I felt sufficiently fueled for the next task for the day - swimming!

Since my first open water swim race in Oliver is coming up way before any lakes in Calgary are warm enough to swim in I asked Angie and Richelle for a few tips. They normally swim at 9 pm so I headed off to their pool for their workout. Purely by coincidence I was also wearing my sushi suit - so I was sushi fueled, inside and out!! Richelle was in charge for the swim and I got in a lane with three other ladies from my team and got ready to go. We ran through a warm up, then moved into a 500m time trial. The only real 500m time I have to compare to was my swim at the Strathmore Women's Triathlon - 13:51. I figured I'd be a bit faster, maybe around the 11:00 mark or so. I pushed off first and I had a few goals in mind:

• To swim strong and confident, and to keep my breathing under control.
• To not get passed.
• To pass someone if at all possible.

Mission accomplished on all three fronts! I felt so smooth and comfortable on the swim. I was swimming strong and not flailing about and getting myself out of breath. I touched the wall in 10:20 which was definitely better than I was expecting. That is more than a 3 minute improvement on 500m! Woo hoo!!!

From there we moved into some sighting drills like doing a heads up front crawl, or a front crawl with alligator eyes. I'm not sure I'd want to spend too much time doing a heads up front crawl as you have to kick extra hard to combat your sinking legs and it gets pretty tiring. Not to mention you can swallow mouthfuls of water. After that Richelle took the lanes down and we covered deep water starts, which is especially key since Lake Stevens is a deep water start off of a dock. After that we talked about how to execute turns around a buoy. It went so much better today than the last time I tried this and I feel a lot more comfortable with this skill now! All in all a great swim - thanks Richelle! I'm thinking the sushi may have been a good boost as well!!
---
No doubt you have all heard of the Running Superfans by now. These guys are hilarious!! There are all kinds of great videos to check out to see what lengths these guys will go to in order to inspire others to run right here. This one is by far my favourite though:

Carl and Karl Underwood love running.

They love marathons, half-marathons, and half-half-marathons. They love 5Ks, 10ks, and think 401Ks sound pretty fun. They think cross-country, steeplechase, and the first 90% of pole vaulting aren’t too bad, either.

The Underwood brothers are Running’s #1 Superfans and their mission is to share their love of running with the world.