During yesterday's strength training session, I tweaked my knee during dumbbell squats. It just felt like a light pinch over my right knee cap, nothing major but I need to watch it and not over train. Since I tweaked my knee I wanted to try and minimize any impact on it for an interval session today. The obvious choice was to hit the pool and do my intervals in the water.
I really enjoy swimming. Growing up in Miami/Ft.Lauderdale, everyone had a pool in their back yard as well as the gorgeous beaches. Living in Cleveland, I'm right off of Lake Erie so I've been in and around water all my life but it had been quite awhile since I'd spent any time in the water.
It's a humbling experience when you first get back in a pool and try to do laps. When I was younger, I could literally swim all day long but time and inactivity caught up to me. Training for the SEAL Challenge helped me find my swimming grove again and by the time I took the SEAL Challenge, I was back into good swimming condition though I still hadn't reached my ultimate goal of swimming a mile.
Well, it seems swimming is no different from running or weight lifting, if you don't do it for a while you lose that conditioning (was this really unexpected? no, not really) and have to start over.
Even though the swim was harder than I had hoped, I still did decent intervals. I warmed up by swimming freestyle for 3 minutes. That was an achievement itself. I was questioning my ability to do sprints after that light warm up.
After warming up I swam 25M (one length) as fast as I could freestyle and then I'd slowly breast stroke back and rest for a minute or two. I did 6 sets of this routine and WOW was my heart pumping after each sprint.
I may switch to swimming for all my intervals, not only do I feel like I got a great cardio workout, my entire body feels like it got a great, low-impact workout too.
Who knows, by next summer maybe I'll be sporting a Michael Phelps like body from swimming so much!
the only thing you have in common with michael phelps is his diet.
Alright, I've been decent about letting these comments get published because I can man up and admit I gave into my weaknesses. I knew that I'd open myself up to some ridicule (which I deserve, to a point) but if all your going to do is come on here criticize and make fun of me and what I'm trying to do then I'll stop publishing your comments. I believe in an open dialog, but when that dialog no longer serves the purpose of enriching the community I have no problems with stopping it.
I'm sorry I let you down just like I'm sorry I let myself down. Every day I didn't workout and every day I ate crap I felt responsible to the folks who read NMFD. That sense of responsibility, to myself and the NMFD community is one of the things that brought me back. If it weren't for this community, I may well have just kept on going down the path I was following.
So please, either find it somewhere in you to forgive me and let's move on or just stop posting comments that serve no purpose other than to make you feel better than me.