Monthly Cycle

Every fourth Wednesday I wake up the same way. I have a headache. My stomach churns and makes loud rumbly noises. I am bloated. I am exhausted. I always think I am getting a cold.

It's annoying and it's perfectly predictable.

I used to sleep in as long as possible on those mornings and drag myself to work, counting down the hours until I could go home and back to bed. By the next morning I would be right as rain.

Now that I swim on Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, I don't really have that option. Yes, I guess I could forgo my swim to stay buried under the covers for an extra two hours but I don't. Partly because I'm stubborn and partly because I paid for the class so I'm going dammit!

This past Wednesday was the day. I woke up with the headache and the rumbly tummy. I woke up exhausted and with a scratchy throat. I woke up at 4:55am and yanked myself out of bed with a grumble.

I got to the pool and read the workout for the day. It read:

Warm up
200m swim
100m kick
100m pull

Workout
8x50m swim (each 50m on 1:15)
8x25m kick (with fins - each 25m on 30 seconds)
2x100m swim (each on 2:15)
100m drill (which means a slow recovery swim where you practice a particular technique that you're bad at. I practice getting my hands to enter the water in the proper spot and I practice keeping my head down)

Ok, I could live with that workout - in fact it seemed rather easy for a Wednesday morning.

That's when I spotted the little 4x beside the workout. Which meant we had to do the entire set four times.

That would be a grand total of 4000m of swimming in an hour and a half.

You know my tummy is rumbly right? And my head hurts (insert whiny voice here).

I debated, as I do every fourth Wednesday, of telling Christine that I'm feeling poorly. I never do though, out of pride more than anything else.

Half way through the first 8x50m she yells "you're doing great, only four more!". I do the math in my head and debate yelling back "actually, we technically have 28 more" but I don't. Best to tackle the workout in little bites so we don't choke right?

Swimming is so bizarre in how it works. The first part of any hard set seems to be the hardest. By the 4th or 5th 50m sprint, I'm always exhausted and unsure if I can continue. I push through and, all of a sudden, I feel like I can go for a long time.

The first run through the set, I felt pretty crappy and my headache was like a vice around my eyes.
The second run through, I was so exhausted I was not sure I could finish.
The third run through felt great.
The fourth (which we didn't quite finish because of time) was not long enough and I was sad that we didn't get it all in.

I left the pool feeling a little less crampy, tired and headachy. I also survived the day with more energy in the tank than I normally would have had and I managed to stay up until 9pm.

Remind me of that in four weeks when the alarm goes off on a cold December Wednesday morning and I wake up feeling awful and convinced I'm getting a cold.