6 down, 3 to go

Week 6 (of hopefully, just 9) is coming to an end, and assuming I drag my carcass thru the pool tomorrow it'll be the full 5 days in the pool this week. The first time I've hit all my planned workouts since the first week of this aquatic journey. Plus I swam 20 lengths last night just for grins.

Here's my progress against the plan for the 9 weeks of pool running.....

A green "Y" means I did the workout, a red "N" means I had some lame excuse and wimped out. Given the fact that I had been running 6 days/week pretty much every week, rain or shine, it is obvious that I don't like pool running all that much.

The long "run" this week was over an hour. For me, that is a long time to be running in the pool. After 20 minutes I was thinking about bailing out but I decided I was going to be hardcore and "push thru it". Spent the next 40 minutes projecting where I would be if I was running my favorite 6 mile loop thru the hills. It got me to the end and I felt like a superhero for finishing. Nothing can stop me, I am invincible!!!!

That night I watched a movie called "Running on the Sun", about Badwater, a 135 mile endurance race that starts in Death Valley and climbs up to the top of Mount Whitney. The winner that year ran it in something like 28 hours. Some crazy lady was hallucinating, guys were throwing up on the road, some marine dude needed an IV, it was 130 degrees during the day. and climbed 8,000 feet. After that, I didn't feel quite so hardcore for splashing around in the pool for an hour.

But it's almost time to register for the London Marathon (April 2008), and I am starting to get really excited about that. Hopefully both my brother and sister will get selected thru the lottery and all three of us can run it. I'll try the lottery too as a UK resident, but I can also buy my way in thru a travel company since I'm an overseas entrant.

The one upside of pool running is that it is much more of a full body workout. I feel a lot better in terms of overall muscle balance and I am hoping that it will help me when I get back to running on the road sometime in August. I'm going to run/walk a couple miles this Thursday, and maybe a few more on Sunday if things go well, but it'll be August 8th (in Tahoe) when I finally try to run 2 miles solid. It will have been 55 days since I last ran properly (June 14th - a very hot 7 miler that almost killed me). Given that I hadn't run at all prior to April 2006, I can't believe how much I miss it.