It's 8:30AM and I've been up for 4 hours already

I woke up at 4:30 this morning. I was expecting to be bleary eyed, grumpy, and not really motivated. However, I popped up out of bed and got ready in time to leave by 5:00. Why? I had a masters swim practice this morning with T3. It is kind of a drive from where I live, but at that time in the morning, it isn't bad. I swam a total of about 3800yds which is huge for me. I normally swim about 3000-3200yds when I was swimming on my own last year. Also, I've swam at most 2600yds since IMFL. Also, I've been really easy on swimming since IMFL. Today, I was doing some decently hard intervals and I was holding them anywhere from 1:28-1:35/100yds. Not too shabby. However, I got tired pretty quickly and then the speed dropped of a bit. The speed also dropped off a bit because Maurice showed me some things. I feel like I'm a pretty quick learner when it comes to swimming. From doing a combination of swimming and yoga, I can notice pretty subtle difference in my body when I'm doing things. Maurice wanted me to drop my shoulder more when I was extending out at the beginning of a stroke. This felt weird to me but it forced me to roll over more since I know I tend to swim flat. He wanted me to concentrate on putting my shoulder underneath my chin every time. I did it and it was awkward at first. But after about 200yds, my body realized that this was probably a better stroke and the different muscle recruitment started kicking in and working better. I swam slower when I started doing this, but I know in order to get faster, I need to get slower first when I change my stroke. The biggest difference is that it sounded different. The way that I was sinking my shoulder, it caused a hole in the water that would crash together instead of my old stroke where I would gently slip into the water. It was just weird realizing that my stroke sounded different. Overall, it was a good swim.

Last night, I had a fantastic run. I was suppose to do a 40min run with 5x2min fast, 1 min easy. I went wandering around in a neighborhood next to mine and almost got lost. I went a total of 37:55 instead of the 40min and MapMyRun said that I did about 4.77 miles. That's a pace of about 7:56/mile which is way faster than I have been running lately. It felt like I was flying last night and it looks like I was. My heart rate never got above 170bpm or so so I had some gas left in the tank if I wanted to go faster. I didn't because I'm trying to ease into this speed stuff. What made the difference last night? I have no clue, but I just concentrated on high knees, relaxed and down shoulders, and weight forward. Wow, I think this made a difference. I'll do another run on Thursday with Texas Iron and see if I get similar results. I'm just feeling really good because of this today since it seems like my body is back to the point where it wants to get faster again. I just have to watch out for injuries. And I almost broke my ankle off last night stepping into a hole in the road running in the dark. That wasn't fun.

I did a 60min spin on Tuesday morning. It's hard trying to simulate hills on a trainer or spin bike. Didn't feel good during the workout and couldn't get my heart rate up.

Monday night was a tough core workout at J&A. He got pissed off because some people were talking during the workout, including myself. He yelled at us and I shut up. One other guy kept talking and that's where Adam got pissed. It hurt, but I stuck with it because I knew it was only going to be 45 minutes and it was going to be a challenge which I needed. I'm still sore today from that workout and was feeling it in swim practice this morning. I'm going to go again tonight, but do no upper body stuff and do only core work.

Another indication that I'm starting to get into great shape again. Before I went for my run last night, I had my HRM on. I wanted to see how my resting heart rate was. I sat down on the couch and just watched it for about a minute. Once I calmed down, it was in the 46-49 range for over a minute. I'll probably check my resting heart rate the next day that I sleep in, but this is a first for me to see it under 50 consistently.

Shoe mileage: 229 miles