Sponsors




Blogs




www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from cao5765. Make your own badge here.

Locations of visitors to this page

Monday, June 19, 2006

Ocean Treadmill

For Fathers Day, I got my wife to agree to accompany me to the beach with my kids while I did a swim with my Cibbows buddies. It was a bit warm, but otherwise a spectacular day to be at the beach. We started out the day being lucky as someone informed me that the spot I took in the municipal parking lot was illegal and subject to a $95 fine. I was able to get back to my car in time and move it to another spot and get back to the beach in time to hit the water with everyone.

The current was moving very swiftly, which made the trip to the white house (going left from the beach) happen fast. I was swimming just slightly ahead of my friend Cristian who soon caught up to me at the normal turn around point. Cristian is a faster swimmer than me, so I decided to try to draft him on the trip back to our starting point and beyond. I was able to keep up with him and we swam hard for about 10 minutes. At that point Cristian stopped to get his bearings and look for any other swimmers. We came across a couple of others and we all remarked how we were swimming hard, but apparently getting nowhere. It was like swimming on a treadmill.

We picked back up again and I stayed on his toes for another 15 minutes before we stopped. When we looked up, you could see that some positive forward progress was made. I was doing all that I could do to stay with him. It felt good to be swimming hard, especially since it has been quite some time since I made a true hard effort in the water. We stopped for a minute or so and when we picked back up again, I really couldn’t continue to hang onto his toes. Perhaps if we didn’t stop I could have kept going, but the stop seemed to sap all of my momentum.

I swam for another 25 minutes on my own at a comfortable pace. I was continuing my forward progress and still feeling good. The water was magnificently clear and had a visibility of at least 15 feet. I started to head back to the start as the time was approaching an hour. I didn’t want to stay out there all day, since I had my kids waiting for me on shore. I was happy to see them busily playing in the sand when I returned. I grabbed a post workout drink and then played with my kids in the sand for the next hour. Down by the surf, we found a strange looking critter, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. If anyone could identify it, I would sure like to know what it is. Hopefully it is not some sort of bizarre crab mutation from contaminated water.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home