Florida

I'm in Florida right now, and I am definitely loving it!

I arrived here the night of Dec. 18th. It was really late- about 1:30 in the morning, before I finally arrived at my grandparent's condo (which I am staying at for the duration of the trip).

While here, I have been able to open up the rest of my Christmas presents (I got a digital camera, money, some books, and a few other things), go shopping, and enjoy the Florida sun. I was also able to see an old friend from elementry school and visit with her for an afternoon.

I have definitly been loving the Florida sun. It is probably about 70-80 degrees here, as opposed to the freezing temperatures at home. I got to miss a couple of snow storms and a day where the temperatures dropped into the single digits. I am definitly happy about missing that!

I have also been going to the pool everyday, and have still been working out. My foot is still not recovered, so I have been doing lots of swimming, weights, and work on the exercise machines. I think I may go see a doctor about my foot if it is not better by the time I get home. I have no idea what happened to it!

With the small pool at Grandma's apartment complex, I have been spending a lot of time working on stroke technique. I have been working on bilateral breathing (it makes my stroke feel so much more balanced!), not breathing in and out of my turns (I get so much more momentum that way), and some stroke drills.

I have been doing something called a "catch-up drill" that helps a lot with extending your reach per stroke. I am really trying to get my stroke count down. It takes me almost 30 strokes to cover one length of the pool, which is not very good. I have also been trying to get my head up more when I swim freestyle.

I learned from one of the coaches on my swim team (she is a new coach, and I hope she stays around because she has really been a huge help to me) that I am swimming with my head too low, pretty much burying my head into the water everytime I take a stroke. When I tried lifting my head, it makes me feel a lot more like I am floating on top of the water when I swim (as opposed to just sinking into it).

There are also SO many other things I can do to improve my freestlye stroke. For one thing, your fingertips are supposed to enter the water (not your whole hand). I have been told by my swim coach before (not the new coach) that I "slap water". Having my finger tips enter the water first is one way I can fix that.

There are also many things I can fix to help me go faster on all my other strokes. On breast stroke, your legs are supposed to come together after every kick. On backstroke, you are supposed to rotate your hips. On fly, you are supposed to keep your head down.

This is really encouraging to me to know that I can get better at swimming. I got some books from the libray that helped me expose many of my stroke flaws (such as the ones listed above). I also got a book from the libray that has 100 different illistrated swim drills. I am going to try at least a couple of them.

For the next couple of months I am going to see how much I can improve at my swimming if I dedicate myself to it. Not only can I change my stroke, and swim faster in practice (like I mentioned before), but I can also improve my nutrition, start a good weight routine, etc.

I'm not ready to give up on a sport I have invested so much time and energy into over the past couple of years. I know my swimming is terrible, but I would really like to see if I can improve it if I work hard enough. I would really like to see how much of swimming is hard work vs. talent. Can hard work overcome lack of talent?

If I don't improve, I will start investing all my time and energy into running. Right now though, as my foot is healing and my swim season is in full swing, I just want to see how much I can improve my swim times. If I improve, that would be awesome! If not (which is highly unlikely), at least I will see the results of dedicating myself towards something. Nothing bad will happen either way.

I have always worked hard at swim practice. I go to practice almost every night, never missing a day unless I have to. I also "sprint" when the coach says "sprint", etc. Just by reading a little though, I have discovered that there is so much more I can be doing.

Swimming is not a sport like running where you get better just by doing it more often. Swimming is more technique driven than fitness driven. I completely have been ignoring the technique part of swimming because I found it so "boring".

I want to be a good swimmer though. I am sick of getting lapped every practice and sick of being ,like, 6 minutes behind everyone else when I race the mile.

My new years resoulutin (one of them, anyway) is to dedicate myself towards swimming as much as I possibly can. I found a good article about a 90 day experiment (where you dedicate yourself completely to swimming for 90 days) here:
http://www.usms.org/forums/showthread.php?t=4229&page=10

Since I don't have 90 days until the last meet of the swim season, however, I am going to have the experiment run from Jan. 1 (giving me a week to figure out exactly what I am going to do in this swim challenge) to Mar. 8 (the day of my last swim meet).

I hope to make some significant improvements, especially in my favorite event, the mile. Yes, this is the same race that I finish 6 minutes behind everyone else in.

I don't know though. If I stuck to the 5K challenge I set for myself (and will probably start once swim season is over and my foot heals), I only have to take 4 and a half minutes off my time. To feel satisfied with myself in this challenge, I would have to take 6 minutes off my mile time.

I don't know. Now I am just yammering. I'll figure out a goal soon though. Either way, I am SO fed up with being the slowest on my swim team!

P.S. You got to love Blogger's auto save feature. I accidently tuned the computer off by flicking the power button with my foot (don't ask how) and was afriad that this entire blog entry disappeared. That was not the case. Every single word was saved.

Thank you Blogger!

P.P.S. I'm still in Forida for a whole 'nother week. Gotta love winter break!

Happy birthday to me...

Some highlights of things I got today:
1. A Garmin! (I've wanted one forever! Now I can actually make a running training program because I will finally know the distances I am running.)
2. An alarm clock can play my iPod.
3. A subscription to Runner's World and Triathlete magazines
4. A Hinder CD
5. A warm sweater
6. Some accessories for my Garmin (i.e. a thing that connects the Garmin to my bike).
7. A biography of Barak Obama (I wasn't really expecting this, but it looks really interesting).
8. A new pair of running shoes.

I still have some more nice things waiting for me to unwrap in Florida too!

As for my foot, it feels like it is finally starting to get better, but it still isn't 100 percent yet. I can't wait until it is finally better though. I have been unable to run for the past two and a half weeks. I am never going to run in non-motion control shoes again! (I injured my foot by running in the wrong type of shoes).

Another good birthday present I got today was a two hour delay for school this morning. It was snowing and raining ice last night, meaning the roads were terrible this morning. I loved this delay because it meant I got to open my presents in the morning, right when I woke up. If I didn't have this delay, I would have been forced to wait until the afternoon when I got home from school when I opened all my gifts.

You voted!

From the results of the poll I put up a couple of weeks ago, it looks like you all like the large pictures on this blog.

Three of you voted. Two of you liked my large pictures. One of you didn't care whether or not there were large pictures on this blog.

Since three people is about the entire readership of this blog, it looks like I got a pretty good sampling of what my readers want on here. If you don't like the huge pictures on this blog, then too bad: you should have voted.

Here is a gallery of large random images to support your votes.

P.S. To whomever voted, thanks for your opinion!

Good morning!

I haven't been doing much running this week, for a reason directly related to losing my shoe last week (but not directly related to losing that sock at Payless- I still have about 50 other pairs of socks!).

Since I don't have my normal motion control Brooks shoes, I had to wear a pair of some of my mom's old sneakers. They didn't fit her because they were too small- but they do fit me. The only problem though is that they are not motion control. I always wear motion control shoes because of my flat, overpronating feet. Without motion control shoes, my flat feet flop all over the place, and tend to get injured.

Such an injury happened this Monday while I was going for a quick 45 minute jog around my neighborhood. My feet were flopping all over the place, and felt a little sore when I returned home, but I didn't really think much about it until the next day (Tuesday).

On Tuesday, I woke up and felt a dull ache in my foot. This ache was on a bone on the side of my right foot. It wasn't extremely painful, but I felt this ache every time I took a step. This dull ache didn't go away on Wednesday- and it stayed with me the entire rest of the week. This is even though I didn't run a single step after Monday (for fear of making the injury worse).

My foot hasn't been feeling much better- but the injury hasn't gotten worse either. I hope my foot feels better so that I can go running tomorrow. I'm going to be extra careful though until my new pair of shoes that I ordered online (the same model I was wearing, just a different color) arrives in the mail. I don't want to hurt myself again!

Despite not being able to do much running, I have still been able to get in some pretty good workouts this week. Some of my swim practices have been killer!

An example of this is my high school practices. I go to my high school practices every Sunday (which means I have a practice with them today!). A lot of the sets we have been doing have killer (at least for me!) intervals. Try swimming 4 X 200 on 3:30, 10 X 50 on 45, and a couple fast 500s (all in the same practice!) and see how you feel!

I also have been having tough practices with my club team. One of such practices was 5 X 100 sprint. By the second 100, I felt really nauseous and out of breath- and I still had to do 3 more! You can imagine how the next three felt! I could barely move at the end of that killer practice!

Although these practices have been really tough, they have really been helping my fitness. An example of this is the meet I swam in yesterday.

In yesterday's meet, I swam the 500 free, and two relays. In one relay, I swam a 50 free. In another relay, I swam a 100 free.

The 500 free was my very first event. The weird thing about this 500 was that it didn't feel as hard swimming at maximum speed as it normally does. I wasn't dead tired, yet I was still working pretty much at maximum heart rate. I thought my time would be really slow, since it didn't feel like I was working that hard; however, I ended up getting a 2 second PR! I couldn't believe it!

I am also recovering a lot better between hard efforts. My coach was kind of evil, and put me in a relay that came pretty much right after my 500. I only had maybe 10 minutes rest. The lucky thing about this relay, however, was that it was only a 50- meaning I would only have to complete one lap (as opposed to 10!).

Despite this lack of recovery time, instead of being dead for the 50, I was able to put out a pretty good amount of speed. I was also able to put out a good amount of speed for my 100 relay about half an hour later. I could have even swum another event if I was forced to!

I had no idea speed work would help so much. Last night was the best I ever physically felt at a meet. I was still pretty tired, but I wasn't dead and exhausted like I normally am.

I thought I could do absolutely nothing else to improve my swimming. I thought that I have reached my potential and should move on. I guess that is not the case. Although I was probably still last in all or most of my events, and didn't take off very much time, it is great to know that I can still get in better shape for swimming. I will definitely appreciate all the speed stuff we have been doing at swim practice a whole lot more now!

This speed work idea will be great for my running also (once I build up a good base of fitness!).

Socks

I will not stop carelessly loosing random things anytime soon.

Yesterday I lost a sock- yes, just one sock- while shopping for shoes at Payless.

I didn't notice I lost this sock until I was about to leave the store. I was about to put my regular shoes back on (my feet were barefoot from trying on so many shoes) when I realized I only had one sock.

I did a quick look around where I was sitting to see if the other sock would turn up. I thought a quick look through the aisle would produce this sock; boy-was I wrong!

This quick look through turned into a 20 minute searching ordeal. I looked under many chairs and through the shoe boxes of every shoe I tried on that afternoon (thinking I might have left it in one of them). No missing sock was found. This sock was also part of one of my favorite pairs!

After much frantic searching, I finally gave up and spent the rest of the day only wearing one sock. Let me tell you, this lopsided feeling was VERY strange. One foot was all nice and cozy, while the other foot was slipping and sliding all around the bottom of my shoe.

I have a theory: Some one-legged thief really loves my choice in footwear. He loved my Brooks shoe I lost the other day, so decided to take it.



This same guy realized he would need a sock to go with this stolen shoe- and what better place to steal it than when my feet are bare (while I am trying on shoes at Payless)!

I'm going to catch that thief one of these days, before he steals another shoe!