Swimming Through Nutella in Cement Shoes

Well, it's fly to Israel for two weeks day. Two weeks of warm weather, omigod so delicious food, sisterly bonding and culture shock.

I don't know how diligent I'm going to be in terms of blogging but so many things happened last week that I wrote a few blogs in advance. I'll write when I can on my travels and try to post pictures along the way. In the meantime, enjoy the next few days full of stories from last week's many adventures.

...starting with swimming in shoes.

After Monday's time trial last week, we were told to bring old running shoes to Wednesday's workout.

Silly me. I actually wondered why we were only bringing shoes. I mean really, we have swum entire workouts in pants and shirts. Isn't swimming in shoes a little wimpy in comparison.

The swimming gods must get a kick out of watching me sometimes.

So Wednesday was essentially a kicking workout. We used our arms for 800m during our warmup and probably about 500m during the workout but, other than that, we kicked.

We started off by kicking al fresco, so to speak.

After ten trips up and down the pool doing that, we put our shoes on. At this point, I was still feeling rather jaded that we weren't doing anything really hard.

I pushed off first with George about ten seconds behind me.

Oh good lord.

Ever tried to kick with someone pulling back on your legs? Not just pulling back but also pulling down? Like wearing cement shoes kinda pulling down?

Yep, that's what it felt like.

This is probably a good time to tell you that Christine wasn't at the pool that morning. She left instructions with the lifeguards who wrote down our workout for us and then tried not to laugh at us while we struggled.

George and I passed each other every minute or so as I went up one side of the lane and he went down the other.

"We should make up a workout for Christine to do" he said. "Something sadistic".

"Yep" I agreed. "Make her do something ridiculous!".

"While we watch her and yell at her to go faster" he replied.

During the workout we went from naked feet to shoes to naked feet to fins. Back to shoes again and then finish with naked feet.

I can assure you that we didn't log too many kilometres but we kicked our brains out and holy bananas it was hard. Like swimming through Nutella only not so delicious.

I decided, in my morbid way, that if I'm ever on a ship that sinks, the shoes will be the first thing to go. Way before the hoodie and the jeans.