Good Ol' Two-a-Days

So since I could only squeeze a little cardio in earlier (that, and my boy is going to kick my butt when it comes to hawai'i prep), I decided I'd go back to the gym this evening to work out some more. Since I lifted yesterday and I'm on a lifting cycle that requires me to lift two days a week, today was aaaall cardio.

So, around 8:15pm I drove back over to the gym and hopped on a treadmill. I actually did the treadmill workout Brandon talked about in the last post:
Minutes 0-2 ... 3.5 mph
Minutes 2-5 ... 5.9 mph
Minutes 5-7 ... 3.5 mph
Rinse, repeat.
While I think my lungs could have handled that for 45 minutes (my brain at least was powering me through), my feet couldn't. Since I haven't run much lately, I'm stupid and forgot that if I'm gonna run, I need to wear my running socks and use anti-blister balm stuff. Obviously I didn't do that tonight because about 20 minutes in, my feet started to hurt. Given that there were a ton of walking segments, though, I toughed it out for 35 minutes - 10 short of the goal. At that point, I got off the treadmill just so I wouldn't get bad blisters (or, i think, prevent them from totally forming).

After that, I was a good girl and stretched. I also noticed that the pool was relatively empty.

Now, to preface this, I haven't gotten in the pool to swim in probably a good month and a half, two months. There was a stretch before the tri that I was swimming 2-3 times a week and while I never really got a lot of pool endurance, I got enough to get me through the swimming portion of the tri in a relatively respectable amount of time and alive. Which really, is all that matters.

Anyway, since I'll be on a beach in, oh, 12 days and hopefully learning how to surf (that is, arm paddling), I figured I better get my ass back in the water and today was basically my last chance all week due to Dave coming in town and other annoying facts of my gender. I stayed in the pool for about 20 minutes, doing the following cycle three times:
- 1 lap freestyle ("typical" swim stroke)
- 1 lap breaststroke (still my strongest!)
- 1 lap backstroke
- 1 lap kickboard (down the pool freestyle kicking, back making like a frog doing the breaststroke kick)
Since I'm still a bit sore from yesterday, it was a little tough at times and my stupid sports asthma kicked in a bit, but for the most part, I was okay. I did 12 laps in the amount of time that I was doing around 16 back in late July, so really, that ain't bad.

In other, basically unrelated news, I received an e-mail today telling me that 2008 registration for the Tri for the Cure opens up January 15! I had a ton of fun doing the tri last year and want to do it again this year. The tri is Sunday, August 3 so all I need to figure out is if Brandon needs to drag me to a wedding that weekend (hopefully not) so I can sign up and hopefully shave 17:22 off last year's time of 1:47:22. I figure if I actually properly train, that shouldn't be an issue ...