From cashmere to karma

I took a pointer from a friend and wore a cozy stocking cap to bed last night to keep my head worm…slept like a baby, cozy, and no headache in the morning. So cozy though that I didn’t get out of bed to go swimming until 6:00 a.m. That’s being pretty lazy for me as I generally get up around 5:30 to give myself plenty of time to get wake up. And the longer I snuggled in bed, the more I convinced myself that it would be to late to go at all since I needed to be back by 7:00 to get ready for work. But, I did finally get myself up and made it to the pool after all. Actually, it was this diary that provides the extra oomph these days. In rowing it was nice because you had seven other guys waiting for you. Training on your own is a different story though, so I’m glad I have the diary to put a little guilt pressure…if I don’t stick with my training, it will show up – actually, more like not show up  in the diary.
I’m still starting pretty slow with the swim. I’m doing a 4 lap swim, 4 crawl, 4 crawl with hand paddle and pull buoy, 4 with hand paddle, 4 breath stroke, 2 crawl kick and 2 breath stroke kick. This is a long way from my days back at UW when I did a 10 lap warm up, 10 lap with hand paddle, 10 lap pyramid and 4 lap kicks for crawl and breath stroke. But I’m pretty please with my level so far. I think the swimming will pick up pretty quickly so that I am back to my UW levels within a month.

After work I went to a Braintrust meeting with ONE Northwest (Online Networking for the Environment). Its basically a brainstorming session with a bunch of techies into environmental/social issues to help develop programs for ONE/NW. Its such a rewarding feeling to sit with a bunch of high-caliber thinkers and come up with some really great ideas. Definitely falls into the developing the mind category.

After the Braintrust, I dropped by the old fencing turf, The Wallingford Fencing Club (WFC), to see if the group had returned from their summer location. I used to go to the club when I attended UW. I never really competed much in college but got pretty close. Its been about 3 years since I last fenced, so I was looking forward to re-starting this portion of my training. So here’s where the Karma starts. Turns out that this was the club’s first night back at this location. They had some other temporary digs while they renegotiated the contract for the gym at Hamilton Middle School. Steve was still there an very welcoming. Turns out there was a new Coach, Gary, who hailed from Belorussia and had trained several of their Olympic athletes. Foil is his forte, but he also trains in epee. There are several people in the WFC that are ranked at the national level, so it should be a great place to train on my fencing. Also met a guy, Eliott, who is interested in taking up pentathlon as well. Pretty cool, but it gets better. He was born in Kenya, his dad’s a conservation biologist there, and he’s really into the outdoors. My kind of guy and hopefully another great friend in the making. For now, I plan on attending WFC on Tuesdays, when they have an hour of beginning lessons (I’m plan on being pretty rusty for a while), an hour of footwork and then open fencing and lessons until 9:30. I was always pretty intimidated by the epeeists back in my college days, so a major challenge lies ahead.