Zap!

The pic is of a rather severe instance of last night’s storm, a couple of miles from where monado and I live. (I’ll confess I, er, borrowed this pic from The Toronto Star’s Web site, which I heartily recommend.) I woke at 3 a.m. today to discover that the power was off; monado reports it was still off at 9 a.m., and, according to the Star, our utility is not promising to have everyone back on line before Sunday.

But this was a swim-club morning. Should I go or not? At monado’s suggestion, I called my office, and the auto-attendant answered promptly; thus I knew that the power outage wasn’t city-wide. From our bathroom window you can see the upper floors of Nisbet Lodge, and its lights were on. So I decided that the Innes Centre was probably powered up, and I could, and should, go swimming.

It was pretty wicked. The car, and especially its windshield, was covered with ice, and I got stuck reversing out of our parking spot; fortunately I was able to rock the car out without having to rouse monado to help push. :-) The streets were quiet; yes, it was 6:45 a.m., but it felt like 2 a.m., not the beginning of rush hour.

Only three of the registered seven made it to class. (And, yes, the facility had power.) Thus we had even more of Coach Kelvin’s attention than we usually have. (He’s actually quite good at giving individual attention to seven or eight swimmers at one time.) One poor guy—the fittest of us, of course—was to do 14x100 on 2:00. I was only supposed to do nearly endless 50s on 15-second rest, alternating underswitching, overswitching, and freestyle.

Once again, I have to say that swimming three to five times a week has done wonders. I now, honest to G-d, have a freestyle. (I do not, however, have an “alternate” stroke. Kelvin had us do a few lengths of our “alternate”, and my breststroke was pathetic; that 85-year-old guy at Settlement House who does 20 minutes of breaststroke every day at glacial speed would rule me.)

Back to my freestyle, there’s still tons to work on: my breathing stroke, for instance; my catch; and, of course, my endurance—I can’t realistically do more than 50 yd consecutively. But I can work on these; I feel I now have a base to work on.

The weekend: Lots to do: two lengthy bike work-outs, a core strength work-out, and I hope and expect we’ll be swimming with Andrea (our granddaughter) tomorrow afternoon, after which I’ll do 1200 yd or so of drills. Should be fun.