Pushing water

For this morning's swim I really concentrated a lot on the final part of my stroke, an area the Wendy said I need to work on. Its the last 3/4 of the stroke at the end of the "s" shape, including the final flick with the hand, that I tried to focus on...what I call the "push" I was pretty lax on the warm up but I started in on the "push" with my pyramid. Its pretty obvious that the push makes a lot of difference in my speed through the water as I was able to get the number of strokes it takes to get across the pool down to about 17 (down from 20-21 when I'm just warming up). During my hand paddle and knee board laps, I did a regular push down and then a strong push on the way back. I ended up with 2 few strokes on the hard push, around 17 again. I'm pretty pleased with this, but eventually I need to get my stroke count down by several more strokes. I'm still working on getting my hands to be in the right position when entering the water, Wendy should have some good tips next time we meet...probably in May.

See Sean run

Finally made it to the podiatrist Wendy suggested to start the process to get orthotics for my feet. Dr. McInnes was great. It looks like I do have a few issues to deal with, but with the right orthotic I should be on a regular running schedule in no time. He did give me a temporary orthotic until the final ones are finished, so I thought I might try running in them. So I went and joined the Wednesday runners over on Greenlake. They were doing some specific drills, so I decided to try a light run around Greenlake. Overall it felt good, bug I could definitely tell that I hadn't been running in two months. My cardio is nowhere near where it used to be, and my overall endurance has dropped as well. My feet felt fine during the run, but as usual they started giving me problems a half our after my run. looks like I'll be waiting for the full orthotics before I do any more running.

A bit of biathlon

Started the night by stopping by Greg's to learn how to put my epee together. I'm still at the apprentice level for a while, but with some tools and a little workshop at my place, soon I'll be putting together and tweaking my own weapons with the best of them. The bell on my epee is just way to shiny, so I look forward to breaking it in. I'm going to have to start thinking of some good names for my weapons. After Greg's I headed out to Issaquah to start my shooting adventure. Wendy invited me to tag along to a shooting range to meet her shooting coach, Jim, who helps here train for her biathlon events (both winter and summer). Its been quite a long time since I've picked up a gun of any sort (I used to shoot when I was younger back in Nebraska and New Mexico), so it was great to start looking into options for my shooting training. We went to a shooting range in Issaquah. I watched the biathletes do their thing with rifles and talk to Jim a little about getting some coaching in the pistol portion of the pentathlon. As soon as I get a pistol I'm all set to go. The biathlon looked pretty interesting too, particularly the summer version, but I need to stick to my guns (pardon the pun) if I'm going to get my pentathlon events up to a competitive level quickly.