Happy 4th of July!

Somehow on this lovely, sunny day my training plan says only "strength" on it, and yet my strength class is canceled because the teacher is on Martha's Vineyard (how fair is THAT?), so I am about to use my strength to attack what remains of the mulch pile in my driveway. I would take a picture, except it still looks kind of huge. You don't really appreciate the progress unless you saw it at birth, when it took over the entire driveway. I have a new strategy, though: I am mulching every part of the yard where we can't grow a lawn. Gets rid of mulch quickly, and turns the yard from "weedfest" into "manicured" in the blink of an eye.

I've had some great workouts since my last race, including a very social open water swim last Friday:

My husband was even there, wearing the awesome suit I bought him, but he left before the picture. I practiced drafting and learned that maybe I should just focus on learning to swim straight before I do serious harm to someone. I also gained new respect for some of my teammates. Me: "Do you think XX is peeing right now? [as XX hangs out in waistdeep water with a serious expression]" Teammate: "I don't know, but I'm peeing right now while I'm talking to you." Names left off for obvious reasons.

I have groused here repeatedly about my swimming, but Friday I felt like I had a breakthrough of sorts. We were swimming on the course I recently raced on, where it took me over 13 minutes to complete the swim. On the 3rd of our half-mile laps, I decided to go hard on the way out and did my best to keep up with my coach (who I think was doing an easy cooldown). This got me to the buoy in 5:35. Now I'm willing to believe the course isn't quite symmetric, given the curve of the buoy line, but still: I could have kept that up for the second half, I think, and no way that would have taken me 7:30 to get back, barring an incident with a snapping turtle. But I've never swum that hard in a race--partly because I am afraid I can't keep it up (only now I think I can), and partly because I find it hard to focus. But focusing on trying to keep up with or catch someone worked well, so now I just need to get better at finding that person in a race. Also my coach noticed the totally dorky way I was sighting (pulling entire head out of water) and gave me some tips on that, which should help.

I biked once with a friend from work, where oddly enough we ran across this on our way back to the office:

I also had a great ride Saturday with Alicia, where we managed to keep up a decent pace despite spending much of the time riding side by side to chat.

The weather has turned back to summer again, such that on Friday afternoon at work I found myself fantasizing about this. And then I came home from work to find that my husband had read, and acted on, the same article:

Really, it has so much fruit and veg in it, it's like a health food. But even this drink wasn't enough to cool me off, so Saturday I made a last minute hair appointment and got most of it chopped off.

My hair is now approximately the shape of a bike helmet, which seems sort of ideal from a triathlon, if not a fashion, standpoint. This picture is especially nice because you can see the progress of the injury I sustained from a knife fight walking into a chainlink fence after my last race. I especially like the way the green of the bruise and the red of the cut match my fancy new dress.