bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
75 degrees
Another bike ride. Windy! The only problem I had biking over to the lake was almost running into the cement wall at the start of the double bridge. I was moving over for an approaching biker and went too far. Was it a vision error, or just a freak occurrence? Luckily, I adjusted quickly and was fine, although I played back a version of crashing into the hip-high cement in my head for a few minutes. Yikes. The rest of the bike ride was fine until I got to the bike racks and was trying to dismount. My sandal got caught in my pedal and I scraped the back of my calf with the sharp edges of the pedal as I narrowly avoided falling — that would have hurt. This one was not a vision error. Realized that I had scraped some skin off and was bleeding a little. Ugh! Waited an extra 15 minutes to go into the water to make sure it was okay and had completely stopped bleeding– it was and it had.
The bike ride back did not involve any near misses. Just gravel, sun, and 3 bike surreys nearing the locks and dam no. 1. Would they get stuck on the double bridge?
image: looking off to the left as I biked, noticing the blue river through the trees — water! Thought about all the water I encounter on this bike ride: river, falls, creek, 2 lakes.
swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
73 degrees
Not too many people here for the swim. 10? 20? Rough water, rougher than last night. The swells/waves kept trying to push me to the left. I managed to stay on the course; the first green buoy struggled to do the same. It seemed to be drifting towards the second orange buoy. During the first loop, I contemplated doing only one loop. Then I decided I could do 2. By the end of 2, I decided on 3. After 3, resting in the shallow water I thought I could do a 4th. Nice work, brain and shoulders and legs!
10 Things
- hearing the life guard call out, attention open swimmers, the course is now open. have a great swim!
- seagulls circling in the sky — were they looking for fish? Did they find any?
- I could see my hand in front of me under the water — not clear enough to read my watch, just clear enough to see a hand
- the green buoy closest to the beach was also very close to the far white buoy — only a narrow space between buoys for swimming through. If it had been more crowded, that would have been a cf
- a few vines sliding past my arms
- swimming wide around another swimmer as we neared the green buoy — she stopped. As I breathed on that side I could see her face, but not that clearly. Was she scowling at me?
- someone — a kid? — banging a stick on a metal pole on the beach. It sounded like a flag hitting the flagpole — pretty sure there aren’t any flags near the beach
- Liz (she introduced herself to me) asking about open swim: excuse me, can you tell me about open swim? I’m training for an upcoming triathlon
- a leaking, squeaking nose plug. I wonder if the swimmer I was passing could hear it underwater?
- the final green buoy kept seeming farther away, like I would never reach it — like the hallway in Poltergeist that the mom is running down to the reach the room where Carol Ann is. Decided to count how many strokes it would take to get there, which broke the spell