swim for it!!!

it's no secret, ireland has not exactly lent itself to physical activity for me. it's been less bad since gerry and i got a gym membership; we've been using the gym and pool a decent amount. not an amazing amount (on my part) but decent enough, i'd say.

something that's really suffered since moving from hope years ago, is my swimming. we used to swim for hours a day. seriously. in the summer you would have to do your chores when you got up, and then you got sent to the lake to play. all day. maybe you got to come home for lunch, but that was usually a ruse for me to come home and weed the garden. if we weren't at the lake, we'd be at a friend's house who had a pool. or maybe at the river. but mostly at the lake.

my friend heather and i used to swim across the lake at least twice a day. for adventure we'd go to the public beach and swim 3/4 across to the point where there was this house that had been abandoned and kind of half burned down. and we'd lay on the rocks, chillaxing. we were very tanned.

i'm sure the other side of the lake is at the very least 1km away. it's probably 1.5, but it's been a while. in any case, gerry and i went for a swim a few weeks ago, and yes it *was* after working out on the elliptical machine, but day-amn my arms and shoulders hurt. and i only did like 250m. so i decided that since we're headed back to canada, i'm not going to shame myself by not being able to make it across the lake.

about a week ago i did 625m. saturday i did 1 km. i'm going to get up to 1.5km and then work on my speed. it's not like i couldn't have kept going on saturday, but my form wasn't great by the end. and it's never been a race to get to the other side, but i want to be able to have enough energy to play on the log at lake of the woods, or swim back at kawkawa lake.

the other swimming goal? to get gerry to be able to swim across the lake too. so far he can do two laps without drowning. there's only a month left on our membership here. we might need the time until summer in white rock to practice. soon he'll be ready for that triathalon.