Actually, that was pretty bad

All that worrying I did about swimming into someone at masters' swimming, and here I should have been worrying about simpler stuff, like staying vertical while running.

This is the immediate aftermath of a tumble I took while on a really lovely early morning trail run with two of my super-speedy running teammates. We had headlamps and everything, but I wiped out anyway, landing first on the knee and then bouncing onto my butt.

There wasn't a lot of blood, but the bruising was pretty impressive. The fall was on Friday, and here's the knee again on Monday:

Luckily, the knee was totally runnable and bikeable. Just ugly.

I have been back to masters' swimming 3 more times, and each time I set some new kind of PR. First I swam more butterfly in one workout than I have swum altogether in my entire adult life. I'm using the word "swam" pretty loosely there. Also, "butterfly."

Next time we alternated IM-minus-the-fly sets with hard 100's and 200's, and then finished with a 500 for time. I set a new PR for the amount of lactic acid circulating in my blood while swimming. Also probably a pool record for slowest breaststroke, which some quick YouTube research showed to be the result of me swimming something that vaguely looks like breaststroke but isn't. I was going off whatever I learned in swimming lessons when I was 10, when my teacher (I still remember this, and I still remember her name, which I won't publish here) told me that she was going to pass me, but she really shouldn't, because I swam breaststroke "like a [disabled] frog." Only she said something more offensive than "disabled," because this was 1980.

Tonight we did some ladders and kick sets, and my legs were so trashed from the kicking that I had trouble pushing off the wall on turns for the 2nd half of the workout, another first.

In non-athletic news, I've also started taking piano lessons. I played for 8 years as a kid, then quit when I started running year-round in 9th grade. When my 7-yr-old started taking lessons this fall, I finally got our piano tuned, and when I found myself playing for up to an hour a day I figured I might as well get some instruction. My daughter asked me if I was having a midlife crisis, between the swimming and the piano. I told her I probably am, but that these seem like comparatively mild ways to express it. Also, how does a 5th grader know about midlife crises?