This past Sunday was the first official Iron Team training. I can't lie. I was super duper nervous. Not because it was a bunch of new people I didnt' know or because it meant I am really going to train for this thing, but because it meant i was swimming. See, i've had a pool pretty much my entire life but never really learned how to swim. Sure I can doggy paddle and stay above water and I can swim underwater, but the freestyle/side stroke/butterfly, they all are foreign to me.
I think part of my not learning is attributed for my major dislike of a few key factors that come into play while swimming:
- i don't like getting water up my nose
- i hate when my hair turns green from the chlorine
- water in my ears is irritating
- me and the cold don't mix
but the other part is I never really learned the strokes. well, okay, truth be told, i sort of learned the strokes a few years ago at that fall semester class at foothill college but it wasn't pretty. i learned the freestyle and backstroke but wasn't very good at swimming...if there weren't fins or kickboards involved i couldn't make it across the short distance of the pool lane (i think it was 25 yards at best). i lasted until around late November, until that time we showed up and the pool heater was turned way down and the water was in the 60s and we still swam. 
This Sunday, we got to the pool for an 8am start and it was really cold! yeah, that gauge in the pix does read 35 degrees. brrrrr!!!!! did i mention the other reason i avoided learning to swim as a kid was my major dislike of the cold?!? fortunately this is CA and like every high school has its own pool and the ones we swim at do a good job at keeping the pool at a toasty temperature year round. the first thing was to get into the pool. seriously, just like jump on in?!? i didn't really know what to do so i got in with the total newbies and waited for swim coach Karen to come help us out. The direction was to go warm up and i thought 'oh no, i have to swim now...what am i doing???? can i do this??? what was i thinking?" Honoree Keith and I were in the same swim lane and he was just as bad off in the swim category as me so i felt a little better because misery does love company. we set off on our first lap and you know what, just like Tony Little said "You Can Do It!" We both made it to the other end of the pool without stopping...the form may not have been so great but we got there. we were so excited that we high 10'ed at the end of the pool ever lap.
after the warm up we had 15 minutes of swimming and counting our laps. i think i made it a total of 7 laps (out and back) and was pretty much felt done then. after that we did a bunch of swimming drills like 6-3-6 (6 side kicks, 3 free styles, 6 side kicks), swimming on our back and just kicking, the catch-up drill (where you swim free style but you don't alternate your arms, you have them both meet in front of you before you do a stroke with each arm), and some other ones i forget. now i was really cooked and my shoulders were starting to get sore. but we weren't done...we had pyramids to do. 200 yards, 300 yards, 400 yards, 500 yards, 600 yards, then back down. i made it through to the 400 yards and called it quits. all in all, my first day ever swimming without fins and without a kickboard went pretty well. See, I can totally swim, umm...wade water!
After our first swim, it was the first transition. i'm gonna have to get used to this peeling off wet bathing suits and then putting on running/riding clothes. i got all hung up in my sports bra and had to get a team mate to get me untangled. i guess this is going to be the first of many awkward situations i'm going to find myself in with my new teammates :-) after getting out of the locker room as one of the last folks out, we set off for a 40 minute run. i had the chance to run with Colin and catch up. he had been my first every cycling mentor when i joined team in training when i moved to California in 2006...and now we are training for the ironman together! 
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