These days, I need the weeks to recover from my weekends. How tiring! This weekend was crazy nonstop activity.
Friday night was swimming with Buzz and Becca in order to prepare Buzz for the swimming portion of the two triathlons we are doing on May 2 and June 13. After that session, I called my mom and thanked her for putting me in swimming lessons all those years! It’s funny–on Friday I realized that 1) I really know how to swim and 2) I totally take it for granted. Poor Buzz cannot swim! Well, I mean, she can swim, as in she probably wouldn’t immediately drown if thrown in the water…but she has never been really taught how to cover any sort of distance in the water. We needed accurate 300-meter swim times to submit for the first triathlon we’re doing.
I’m not exactly sure how long the lap pool in my complex is (it’s either 25 yards or 25 meters, don’t know which), but my time for 6 laps/12 lengths was 6:10. If the pool is only 25 yards, I’d need to do one more length to get to 300 meters, which would put me right at 6:40, which is the time I submitted based on scaling my half mile swim time from the triathlon last year. Anyway. Becca covered the 6 lap/12 length distance in about 9:00 (though she’s not doing the triathlon, she timed herself anyway). Buzz didn’t actually do the distance all at once, but we estimated her time at somewhere around 13:00.
It was sort of surreal. Buzz is the most athletic girl that I know; she’s incredibly strong and always pushes herself hard. But never having had a good swimming lesson, she’s less-than-average in the water. I’ve never taught swimming before so I’m not quite sure how to help her, but I think practice will help as much as anything. Her stroke was getting better towards the end of the 45 minutes we spent in the pool, and I think it will continue to improve.
Saturday morning I got up early to run in the Resurrection Run at a church nearby in Nassau Bay. Sean and Amy were both there, along with Kristin (wife of a guy that works down the hall), so that was fun. I finished in 30:30, which is more than a minute off the last 5K that I ran back in December, but I guess it’s ok considering I haven’t done much running lately. I was really hoping to finish under 30 minutes, but I started too fast (a 9:28 first mile) and as a result, felt horrible enough during the second mile that I had to take a couple quick walking breaks. I am so bad at judging my pace, but I’m going to have to work on it if I ever want to consistently finish under 30 minutes. I think I could have done it on Saturday if I’d only started with a 10 minute mile, and then sped up.
From the race it was home to shower, then lunch with Becca and Buzz at Mediterraneo, followed by a cheesy yet satisfying girl flick, The Prince and Me. From there it was home to meet Debbie, Paul and Sonia and then head downtown for the “final” Aeros game of the season. “Final” because they’ve made the playoffs, so there will be at least a few more games this year…
Sunday I was up early again. I sort of forgot about Easter; it came and went, my mom sent me a pretty pottery basket and my cow-print egg bunny (hard to explain), and that is that. Instead of having a big meal or going to church, I spent the day in the cold rain getting covered with mud and bushwhacking through the woods. Debbie, Jason, Paul, Sonia, Laura and I headed about 100 miles north to Huntsville State Park to mountain bike and geocache.
It was definitely an adventure, thanks to six different people with six different ideas of how to proceed. It was chilly (about 55 degrees), rainy, and muddy and people were in cranky moods, but in the end, at least three of us had fun, I think. We left Clear Lake around 9:30, checked out the Sam Houston statue around 11:00, made a pit stop at McDonald’s for lunch and Wal-Mart for sweatshirts and raincoats (it was colder and wetter than we expected!). We were in the park by 12:30. The six of us covered a mile or so on bikes before Paul’s crappy Las Palmas borrowed bike gave out, and the others were cold and wet. They warmed up in the car while Jason, Debbie and I covered another 5 miles of trail on bikes. By then the rain had stopped, and we were already wet and muddy anyway, so we decided to do a little caching. We found three easily, and Jason, Debbie and I ended up covering another ~3 miles on foot after we got lost on our way back from finding two of them. Oops. We made a final pit stop at Walmart to change into dry clean clothes before heading back to Clear Lake. Jason, Debbie and I had dinner at Texas Roadhouse and I finally got home 12 hours after we’d left, at 9:30.
Despite the arguing and crankiness and worrying, I had a good time. Just another lesson on how groups don’t always work well together. Pictures are here.
And finally, tonight is Yuri’s Night–for real. We’ve already had the 5K and the educational events, but April 12 is the actual anniversary of 43 years of human spaceflight. So wherever you are, tell someone that space is cool, and if you’re in Houston, fight the nasty weather and come to Outrigger’s for a fun party!
