At the gym

On the way into the locker room, there's a plastic frame that usually holds some kind of inspirational rubbish (we are defined not by the times we fall but how we pick ourselves up, that kind of thing).

But recently, someone switched the sign for this:
Needless to say, this has been a big improvement! You can see more of these kinds of things here.

On the road, in the pool

Still trucking along in both places. I haven't pushed beyond about three miles running because I'd really like to not wear anything ligament-like out again. But it is going pretty well and we live near a big park (1.1 miles in circumference), so I think that might be helping. Swimming is still a pain in the shoulder sometimes, but I'm doing about 3,000 yards a workout three or four times a week.

Yep, that's all I have to report. How about some more Springsteen?

By land and sea

So, I started running again (maximum distance so far, a whopping two miles), and I'm still swimming, though I'm mixing the two to try to fend off injuries. Now I'm wondering if I should consider maybe doing a triathlon, one of the short ones. I'm ambivalent. I haven't really enjoyed riding a bike since I was edged off the road by a careless driver and crashed.

That wasn't a great moment, but it was a long time ago and it is ridiculous to live in the past. But with our place in New Hampshire being super bike-unfriendly and life being pretty busy here, I just haven't bothered to pick up the habit, which I enjoyed very much before.

Well, who knows? But it might be fun to take a shot at a triathlon. I think there's one in town with reasonable distances (500-yard swim, 5-kilometer run, 20-mile bike ride).

Swimming

Ages ago, I thought I'd use this space to chronicle my conversion from long-distance runner (boy, talk about the distant past...) to swimmer.

That fabulous process started with a ligament strain (MCL, I think) sustained trying to recapture being a distance runner from being a guy who used to be a distance runner.

Swimming hasn't gone entirely swimmingly. I hit the pool in late summer 2005 and started having shoulder problems in January 2006 that haven't really gone away. But I also lost a lot of weight (21 pounds from then to now, as well as a few inches off the waistline). And I'm getting faster, finally, thank god.

And less injured, too, I think. The other week, I got a tip from a fellow pool person that, combined with an observation of a speedy swimmer girl, has taken damn near all the pain out of swimming. I suspect I'll still need the massage therapy and such for a while, but maybe the light is finally shining at the end of the tunnel. And the light isn't a fast-approaching train :)

Eating Alarm Time...

One of the features my paper carries is called the Diet Detective, a weekly column by Charles Stuart Platkin. We don't run it every week: Some columns are much better than others. This week's is about Eating Alarm Times (maybe he's German and likes capitalizing things). Platkin calls the EAT (oh, clever clever. I just got it) a time when a person can consume an extra 300 calories, thus gaining weight.

His column is based on asking people about their EATs, and the results are pretty interesting, if for no other reason than that mine is the third-most popular. He calls it Afternoon Snack Attack, between 1 and 5 p.m. I call this period "lunch" because I eat after swimming. That seems like maybe a better plan than wolfing down a sandwich before jumping in the pool. Anyway, I do notice that when I get done swimming, I am even more ravenously hungry than usual.

By "usual" I mean almost all the time since I dropped about 25 pounds in August 2005. I also get cold more easily than I used to, but I have a pretty high tolerance for being cold, so maybe now I'm just normal. Whatever. I'm still hungry, damn it.