It's Tuesday. I should post something. Seems like I always post on Tuesdays. Wonder why? Maybe I should spend a few hours psycho-analyzing why it's always Tuesday.

Or, I could look up some guitar information. Guitars are cool. The Gibson "loaned" to me by my brother plays very well. Hopefully I will live up to the instrument's reputation. Not that my "20 minutes a week" practice method will turn me into Otmar Libert any time soon but it's fun. It won't advance my career OR help me lose weight. Fantastic. All the more reason to practice once a week. :-)

Another great swim today. Finally felt like my body was "getting it" in the water. The last 5 laps were almost as fast as my first 4. Not too shabby. If only I could memorize the feeling with every part of my body. The flow, speed, and grace of winding through the water.

On more practical fronts, I turned in what I hope is the last edit of my proposal. It is ready for the entire committee. Right now we are just wordsmithing it. Everyone has their own way to say things. There is no reason to spend 3 weeks making it perfect for person A only to have B, C, D, E, and F decide they don't like the way person A phrases sentances. Now, on to the grant!

The samples are running! Yeah!

It's hard to work out when so many things wait on the "To Do" list. The list overwhelms me, there is no way to do it all, why try?

More than once this type of thinking has won. Today I followed a different set of thoughts. In fact, the thoughts started last night. "Sure, you have to get up early to process samples. You don't have to do weights but just put your swimming stuff next to your laptop. Maybe you'll have time." All morning the reasons to skip the workout jumped about in my head. Rather than reason with the reasons, I put off the decision by saying "I'll wait and see how I feel once the samples are being analyzed". The instrument takes a while to warmup before analysis so I spent a fair amount of time creating a plan for my swim. I even looked up some drills, calculated distances, etc. The pool didn't seem quite so bad. Not that I was enthused, however, I made the trip over to the pool once the machine started it's analyses.

As I stood in the shallow end of the lane, my seal mask fell apart. SIGH. It took so much just to get there, I thought about leaving. However, a little part of me said "stay". Several attempts to fix the mask failed. Again I thought of leaving. What made me stay was the same thought process that got me there in the first place "Swim 5 laps of breast stroke and then leave." Rather than focusing on 900 yds of swimming with my head out of the water, I started with a few laps. After 5 laps I switched to a few laps of side stroke. No set number of laps, just do a lap...see how I feel...do another lap....switch back to breast stroke....in the end I covered all 900 yds. Sure, it probably didn't have the same physical benefit as freestyle but the mental victory was an important part of my training.

Little victories like that each day could really make a difference.

No science before coffee

The scale showed me 0.5lb less this morning thanks to my new sensible eating plan, aka, don't eat crap and drink too much beer. I'm sure the 2 weeks of consistent workouts (not one missed!) helped, too.

Two days of straight motivation resulted in a new version of my proposal.

The proposal has been turned in. The experiment is running. The sun is shining.

Some days don't get any better.

I'm heading home before something bad happens.

:-)