In addition to improving our dressing skills, we are also starting to adjust our palates from the mild, chlorine taste of the bourgeois swimming pool to the uber-sophisticated, hyper-salty taste of the Loung Island Sound. I am considering adding a new routine to my training regimen to better to prepare for the OWS – I am going to pour myself a bowl of sea salt, say about a cereal bowl-full, and start eating it with a teaspoon. I think a bowl a day is about right.
While I complained a bit about the OWS in my blog last week, there are some advantages to being out in the open water. One big advantage is that there is no end-wall, where you have to turn around every 25 yards. Unless you are one of those awesome swimmers that can do flip turns, enabling you to keep your momentum while looking like Michael Phelps, stopping at the wall every 25 yards can be a real momentum-killer. However, the wall does serve one important function – it helps you keep track of the distance that you’ve traversed. So long as you can count (don’t discount the difficulty of counting; keeping track of laps is easier said than done, at least for some of us), all you need to do to figure out how far you’ve swam is to multiply the number of lengths that you swam by the length of the pool. It’s pretty simple.
The trouble with open water swimming is that you don’t always know the distance that you are swimming. While some beaches have distance guides or guidelines posted, or distance information is common knowledge and readily passed along from swimmer to swimmer, many beaches do not offer up that information. As a result, the members of Team In Training were left guessing (FYI, for those that don’t know, the guy in the sunglasses in the youtube video is blind) as to how far we swam these past two weeks. Luckily, thanks to one of our “Baywatch” lifeguards (you need to refer back to last week’s blog if you don’t get the reference) who I asked for some guidance as we were leaving the beach, I have a rough estimate of the distance of our swim. TNTers, you can email me if you want to know more.
On a side note, I love Ebay. In full disclosure, I do not own any Ebay stock, so this is not a pump-and-dump stock scheme… only an attorney would put this disclosure in a blog, right? Every now and again you can find an absolute bargain on Ebay. I happen to have been trolling Ebay for a cycling jersey. Why? Because even though I am a middling, at best, cyclist, I want to pretend that I am better than I really am and look the part. Plus, some jerseys just look awesome. However, I don’t have much money to spend on a cycling jersey (I am all out of triathlon gear money) and cycling jerseys can be expensive (I am at the point where anything over $20 is expensive). I was tracking a Super Grover jersey, which, unfortunately, I could not afford ($51 for Super Grover ?!?!) and had to let go. Luckily, I came across this auction, which I won. I won eleven jerseys for $10, including shipping, from an Ebay newbie. Honestly, when I won I was worried that he was going to send me only one jersey, or that the jerseys that he was going to send were going to be dirty, unraveling pieces of garbage. Well, they arrived yesterday, and Teri Hatcher said it best, on Seinfeld, when she said http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL2PicT9Kng.
