Sweating in the water, bike fitting and a great training week...

Taking time off excercise is dangerous...
For me anyway. I love to stay active, but since last February, I've learned to take time off of intense activity when my soul needs to focus on sometime else, or when my body needs to heal. Anyhow, without fail, whenever I take time off intense excercise, I get sick, or my body makes up an injury. Seriously! The last week of August for example- I hadn't been to the gym in a long while, and lo and behold, my right knee hurt so much that I had difficulty going up the stairs for two weeks. As soon as I started my intensive excercise schedule, the pain STOPPED. Excercise is magic!

A great week of sweat...
I'm back in full force! Sweating buckets in the gym two days this week. Running before 6am each morning, swimming three times this week. I'm back on the stairmaster- I hadn't been on the stairmaster since February and I didn't know if 30 minutes would be too much for me, but I was fine! By fine, I mean sweating up a storm and patting myself on the back with each step up. The stairmaster is an awesome cross trainer and I'm focusing on adding that to my routine a few times a week. I don't use the scale to measure my weight-loss progress, but my goal is to lose 20 lb before next July. How do I measure negative 20 lb, you ask? Um...I'll feel lighter:)

A cheaper swim coach...
On Wednesday night while I was waiting for open pool hours, I saw this trainer teaching an aqua strength class. As he ended his class, I heard him say to everyone in the class (mostly women between 30 and 75 years old...well, two men in their mid forties also)...He said to everyone in the class " Now give yourself a hug. I want to hear you say 'I love myself". I won't dismiss you from this class unless I loudly hear you say you love yourself"

I've never heard any trainer speak to a class with such positive energy. Cheesy, but positive. I was so excited because those are the things I believe and when I work with clients, the changes that excite me in their lives are not the physical ones, but the emotional ones. Long story short...

I talked to this trainer after and I asked him if he taught beginner swimmers like myself. He gave me a free 30 minute lesson in the water! A beautiful dreadlocked Haitian trainer. Here are some of the things he told me to do:

-Think of a safe place (I thought of my room and my lovely loft bed...)
-When you are in the water you need to go to that safe space. There is no reason to be afraid of open water swimming (I kept thinking...loser you'd be afraid of Hudson river too....)
-He taught me the jellyfish float!!! (take a deep breath, relax my neck, hold my feet, hold my breath and go underwater.) After like ten tries, he was finally satisfied that I was doing it properly.
-He taught me how to push off with both feet and propel myelf witout kicking of using arms. Very elementary, but he wanted me to let myself glide and know what that feels like....

So I asked him how much his private lessons cost. They would cost me less than half of what I'm paying in Midtown now.

I've made a decision though. I need to stick with the fancy trainer because I like the fancy pool and the whirlpool, steamroom and sauna experience that comes with it afterwards. Although I don't like the hole in my bank account after the lessons, I'm learning so much. I will however take a weekly half hour lesson with this new swim coach because he uses psychology to help me feel more comfortable in the water. And that, is revolutionary.

When I look into my future, I see...A NEW BIKE!
On Friday afternoon, thanks to three good people who want to see me succeed, I went to get fitted for a bike. I learned a new word- "in seam". I measured my height and in-seam and apparently will need to get a 47 size bike (whatever that means). I did however discover that I am half an inch shorter than what I thought I was. Quite traumatic. It will probably be more than a month before I have a bike. I'm going to get a road bike. Fancy and classy from CANNONDALE.

Do you sweat in the water...
This week, my swim coach made me swim a million laps. Ever since she discovered that I can swim a lap, she's gone completely beserk- making me swim and swim and swim. How annoying and tiring. I guess I'm paying for that...

So in the middle of my session this week, I asked her "Do people sweat when they swim?"
She said "Yes, they do- they just don't know it."

Bahumbug. Can someone please give me some kind of scientific response to this question!