Pool Etiquette

I fought an old lady today.

When we arrived at the pool, Shelly and I happily found one lane available. This never happens. We always have to wait at least a few minutes to get a lane. We split the lane and warmed up, then did our first 400 and stopped to rest. As we paused at the wall, a woman got into the pool, and lingered in the lane next to ours (which was being used by a swim teacher and some little kids). She asked Shelly, "are you guys swimming? I just wanted to get across and I don't want to get in your way." I took that to mean that she wanted to cross our lane into the one on the other side (which was populated by two slow lap swimmers). I said, "oh, go ahead." And felt relieved that she was going to share that lane and not ours.

She said "thanks" and moved into our lane. And stayed in our lane. And then just sat there in our lane, bobbing up and down about three yards from the wall.

Shelly and I looked at each other in dismay. We decided to try swimming around her, but she was all over the place. After Shelly and I nearly cracked heads trying to pass her, I stopped and told the woman that I hadn't understood that she wanted to use the lane we were in, and that it wasn't working, could she wait 15 minutes while we finished our set? She got angry immediately and told me that she wasn't aware that the lane was reserved and that she'd talk to management. I agreed that I'd like to talk to management too, and that Shelly and I were there first.

Ugh. If you know me, you know I hate confrontations of any kind, but if there is one thing I will fight about, it's my workout. I waited all day for this and you are not going to ruin it, lady!

I asked the woman if she could at least stay on one side of the lane, and she growled that that would be fine. For the remainder of our workout, the woman stayed at the wall on one side of our lane, bobbing up and down and feebly kicking her feet in place every once in a while.

I made sure my flip turns at that end of the pool were extra splashy.

2009 Race Plans

Shelly and I have several races planned for 2009. We're working toward the big goal of finishing the San Antonio Marathon with a respectable PR in November. We decided to train with San Antonio Fit instead of trying to work out a training plan by ourselves; running with a group every Saturday for 25 weeks should make running in a crowd and pacing ourselves easier on the day of the race.

We're mixing in a lot of triathlon training this summer too. We're training towards our first Sprint in September and our first Olympic in October. If we like the Olympic, we'll do that distance at CapTex next spring and if we still like it...we'll plan to train for the Longhorn IM 70.3 for 2010.

Now that I've put it in writing, it's kind of exciting and scary at the same time. We're three weeks into marathon training and I'm already tired.

Did You Run This Morning?

Shelly and I did our third run with San Antonio Fit this morning. Although we'd been placed in the yellow group based on our time trial time, we chose to run with the slower red group this morning because my knees have been bothering me all week. We had a really nice run with the red group and stayed right around a 10:40 pace for the whole 5-mile run. The run was great even though the weather wasn't (80 degrees and crazy humid outside - hello, summer).

After the run, I headed to HEB to pick up some sodas to take to our company picnic today. The lady at the checkout counter asked, "Did you go for a run this morning?" My red face and wet hair and clothes must have tipped her off. I said yes and apologized for being stinky.

I'm just excited that someone assumed I'm a runner based on my appearance. Is that weird? Hooray!