Running and swimming into the light (for a change)

“The shoelace ties, they come undone
The step after stepping in
Puddles wide, just tie them back up
And then you can run again…”
— Patient Child, an original song of mine

WorldWide WordPress 5k
One month ago I ran my first 10k. One week ago I ran a 5k along with a lot of other WP bloggers. This photo was taken at the end of my run.

I attempted to take a photo of each street at each corner as I turned onto it. That didn’t work out well because I ran while trying to snap away with my phone camera. Most of the pictures are laughably out of focus or just not very interesting. Also, I zoned out a couple of times and didn’t even think about taking a street photo until I got pretty close to the next corner, or was otherwise too far to go back to the intended photo spot. Oops. I had some pretty high hopes of turning these photos into a coherent time-lapse slideshow. Seeing that I am not so good at multitasking while exercising, I’ll have to try that photo project another time.

I can normally cover this distance in about 30 minutes, give or take 3 minutes. I finished this in a leisurely 45 minutes, due to the photos I did manage to stop running to take. I had fun on my adventure. I took time to look around my neighborhood as I don’t normally go running at that time of day. It was interesting to see the route in that context for the first time.

Pool Swim
This weekend included my first pool day this year, swimming laps for about an hour. It wasn’t as tiring as I’d expected. I thought I’d be exhausted and for days I anticipated swallowing a bunch of water as soon as I jumped in, ruining my breathing capacity for the rest of the workout. It wasn’t like that at all. I even got to try using swim fins, which made me fly through the water. My ankles were pretty sore over the next couple of days, because I wasn’t used to lighting the pool lane on fire in my wake. <– Oh, how I kid.

LA locals can take a free SCAQ swim clinic or two to get pointers from swim experts on how to best reduce time and energy expended while swimming any given distance. Did I mention they have swim fins? Check out some Yelp reviews and try it.

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