Beaten by a girl

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that)

It’s insanely beautiful up here. Worst part about summer at the Southern New England shore? Work. Tell me that it’s OK to spend a minimum of 40 hours inside when blue skies the color turquoise, filled with puffy white skies beckon. Tell me that, and I’ll call you a liar.

Work’s busy but great. My clients are happy, my projects are making progress (slowly), and I’ve currently only got a couple of developing personnel crises. Luckily, I’ve just had my 1 year anniversary, so I’m no longer a “provisional” employee. If I can spend some quality time with the requisition system tomorrow, I’ll go into the holiday feeling pretty good about life.

I applied for the backpacking permit for a Connecticut State Park for part of the weekend – the boys and I are going to go see if they’re ready to spend the night in the woods. Actually, scratch that – we’re GOING to go spend the night in the woods, far enough from the car that we can’t bail out at midnight and go home, and see if we get any sleep. My money’s 50/50 that the youngest pretty seriously freaks out. The oldest was asking to take his own tent – I put the kaibosh on that, ’cause (a) it’s one less potential freak out to deal with; and (b) I don’t want to carry it. The campsite is less than a mile from the car, so I don’t think anyone will get too tired.

I got home from the Y tonight, and Missy said “Wow, you look terrible. Swimming must really kill you.”

The problem, my friends, started after I’d done a 250m breast set and a 250m freestyle set. A woman started swimming in the lane immediately next to me, despite an empty entire rest of the pool. Long, languid, lazy strokes of freestyle – next to no splashing when the arms went in; really, really smooth rotary breathing every third stroke.

I started another set at one of her turns, and did 250m free pretty much keeping pace with her. She was turning again just as I finished the fifth lap. I rested a lap, and then started another 250m free, this time trying the fancy breathing on BOTH sides. Didn’t drown quite so much as usual. Almost, but not quite.

She’s still going. Splish, splish, splish, breathe, splish, splish, splish…

So, I do one last 250m free, trying to be relaxed and easy, breathing to the left every fourth stroke – she’s still there.

I thought about doing a final set of 5 laps, but decided that the honorable thing was to admit defeat and move on. I think she closed the place down.

Good on her.

Terramuggus Tri kicks off 14 June. I’m going to try to be there. For the record, it’s going to flat out kill me.