weekend, water, and weight

The weekend was unspectacular, diet-wise. Holiday-wise, it was pretty good. I got all the laundry done, spent a day at the pool, and did touch-up painting at the house to prepare it to sell.

I didn't record anything I ate, mostly because I didn't feel like it. Mostly, I grazed, which isn't the best thing in the world, but isn't terrible. I ate a lot of peanut butter, for some reason...probably just because it was there, actually. It beat cooking. :)

One thing I'm sure of is that I didn't drink nearly enough water. It seems like I'm always saying this, and I'm a little afraid that my kids will put it on my tombstone someday--"Here lies Joy Allison. She should have drunk more water."

So yeah--went to the pool yesterday, and while I was there I got to thinking about the triathlon we're considering for next April. It has a 1/4 mile swim, which the website said was 4 laps in a 50m pool, 8 in a 25m pool. I started to wonder how big the community pool was.

I could have asked a lifeguard, I suppose, but I am painfully shy in person and don't know any of them well enough to speak. So I started to eyeball it. It looked pretty long to me...50m is about 50 yards, right? Half a football field? Was this half a football field? No idea*. I was just about to suck it up and ask a lifeguard when I noticed the tiles. Each one was about 3 inches wide, and the entire pool was tiled in these things. So I started to count the ones along the side of the pool. Some weird looks and mild dizziness later, I came up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 tiles, give or take 50 (I had to stop at the stairs). Twelve tiles per yard puts us at 20-25 yards, which is just about equivalent to 25m. Since swim meets are held here, it's probably standard 25m.

All that to say, I would have to swim 8 laps in this pool to go 1/4 mile. As of yesterday, I can't really even do one. My heart feels like it's about to burst after a length. Swimming is a lot harder than I remember it--probably because I haven't done any serious swimming since I was 12. Maybe I need to rethink this triathlon thing...either that or start to train a lot. Right now, I'm leaning toward that second one, which is all the more reason to consider that gym membership.

On the bright side, I saw 180.0 on the scale yesterday! It's not stuck on 181 after all! Today I was back to 181, of course, but I blame that on the foot-long chili dog** at 8:30 last night. A little water here, some light eating there, and I may see my iPod-ordering number before July after all.

Keep your fingers crossed. :)

*I have what my childhood optometrist used to call cart-horse eyes--it's not really the same as a lazy eye, because neither one is dominant. Only one works at a time unless I really concentrate, so they do a little tag-team thing when I'm tired. This causes me to have almost no depth perception, and therefore the pool could have been 10 or 50 yards long and it would have looked pretty much the same to me.

**Yes, I said foot-long chili dog. No, I don't want to talk about it.