Sunday is the big day

Sharkfest! is here. Thanks to Bigun for his wonderful write up of his ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ I am really excited and not so scared. If you haven’t read it either at raceAthlete or on his own blog, git on over there. It is beyond entertaining.

I’ve been trying to figure out all week what I should or shouldn’t do for workouts. It’s a little hard to think of tapering for a 1.5 mile swim but you really don’t want to cramp up or lose steam when you are in the middle of SF Bay, battling Great Whites so I’ve taken it easy. Monday I ran, Tuesday I swam but we did a lot of drills (I still made my arms sore), Wednesday I spent the entire day in running clothes and never left the house, Thursday I tossed myself out the door mid-day for a run in the heat and today I am not doing anything. Tomorrow I will do a little easy open water swimming with the tri clinic peeps and then Sunday I will meet up with FeLady, pull on a wetsuit, hop on a ferry, hop off said ferry into the cold waters of the San Francisco Bay, scream “OH MY GOD THIS IS COLD!”, put some more water in the wetsuit and yell “REALLY COLD!!!”, swim to the starting line, hear the foghorn go off and start swimming. I expect by then I will be warm and very happy to be following the boat with the big buoy on the back.

And yes – I will be wearing a different pair of goggles than the ones I wore for my funny but not all that successful swim at Wildflower. I will wear clear goggles and if they fog up I will stop and rinse them out.

Funny comment on another topic –One of my guilty pleasures is watching dancing shows. I watched all of “Dancing with the Stars” (go Apolo!) and I’m now watching “So You Think You Can Dance”. I love watching dancers because I know from painful experience that the coordination it takes to do the moves with grace and in rhythm with the music is not that easy to come by. I took a dance class once in college and let’s just leave it at I was not born to dance. Anyhow, last night they were picking the 20 people who will be on the show and one after the other the judges first scared each contestant by hinting that they hadn’t made it and then told them they had. It was sort of irritating but the result was that each contestant got emotionally overwrought fighting back tears of disappointment and then when they got the good news morphed in to an explosion of unbridled ecstasy. Tears were shed and words flew out of mouths and my favorite of all was a girl who clearly wanted to say STFU! but who instead said “Shut The Front Door!” I loved that. It conveyed the same sentiment without being crude.