Today's brick

I'm tapering. Yeah. That's it. The Baltimore Marathon is eleven days away. Life is supposed to be crazy when you're tapering.

Woke up at 5:00 AM on the dot without the alarm. Rolled out of bed and just kept rolling. Am I GOOD or what!?

This morning's swim: 2100 m. Yay for getting in the distance!

Samoan Butterfly Man was there. I saw him standing there looking for a lane and so I started doing breaststroke suddenly to fill up the whole lane and ward him off, and it worked. After he picked his lane I resumed my workout doing freestyle and he merely splashed me from the adjacent lane.

I did Yurtie's ladder of sucky sprints again, correctly repeating the whole thing this time:

• 200m with normal, normal, normal, sprint lengths.
• 200m with normal, normal, sprint, sprint lengths.
• 200m with normal, sprint, sprint, sprint lengths.
• Repeat.

Results compared to 12 days ago: the "normal" lengths averaged 4.9 seconds faster (at 45.7 sec), and the "sprint" lengths averaged 1.0 seconds faster (at 44.1 sec). They still sucked, and I drank a lot of the pool on the sprint lengths, but I'll call that progress! It's just going to be a while before my form doesn't go to hell when I'm trying to push the speed.

Out of the pool and downstairs to the treadmill. My hair was insane after the pool because I had forgotten a hairbrush and I couldn't get a comb through the knots. The custodian lady was wiping off my treadmill just as I arrived. What an exercise in futility! I dripped all over it and sprayed sweat everywhere. People stared. I ignored them. I put the incline on 2% to give me a little more preparation for those Baltimore hills, warmed up 1/4 mile, ran 3 miles at 12 min/mile, then cooled down for 1/4 mile.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!