May 1st...

Wow.. May 1st is here. I can't believe it. Summer is just around the corner it seems..and you know what that means.. outdoor swimming at central park! yay! Although, I must say one thing about outdoor swimming. It sucks for backstroke which is my best stroke at the moment because the glare of the sun always gets in your eyes and it's harder to swim in a straight line. Perhaps I should invest in a pair of tinted goggles.. we'll see...
Also, another important date is coming up soon as well. My birthday is less than 2 weeks away. I'll be 28 years young... wow how time flies. I often find nowadays I feel nostalgic for my childhood. I would say that I had a pretty good childhood. There were certainly a lot of happy memories. I must say that oftentimes I wish things in my life were different.. but I guess you have to deal the hand you are dealt with...

I hope that my gf does something special for me on my birthday. She hasn't said about anything she is planning. Hopefully it will be a nice surprise. I'm hoping that we can do some travelling this summer. It feels like I haven't taken an extended vacation for ages... There might be a possibility later this summer to take a trip for work to Taiwan for a couple fo weeks where hopefully I can spend a bit of extra time relaxing as well as doing work of course. I'll have to see how it goes.

Swim practice was alright tonight. We did 16x25 - 4 on 40, 4 on 35, 4 on 30 and 4 on 20. The last four was basically a sprint and I didn't even stop at the wall but instead did flipturns and kept swimming. After that, we did 3x100 backstroke on 2:00 with fins for time. I did a 1:17, 1:12 and 1:09. I was fairly happy with that. Then, we did 4x75 on 1:40 where we had to equal our 100m backstroke time with fins doing a 75 without fins. I didn't have much of a problem with that. I did about 1:03 or 1:04 for each 75 without fins which is about 1:24 pace for the 100m backstroke. So that's not too bad. We did 4x25 of backstroke drill after that where we did one arm and then the other arm and then catchup drill.

After the backstroke was finished, we did a timed 100m breaststroke negative split. I surprised myself and did about a 1:40. Chris killed everyone and did a 1:28. Man, that guy just loves to race...We finished off the practice with 4x50 free where we did the first one on 40, then the next one on 50 and the last 2 on 1:00 (to warm down I would imagine). I didn't have much problem making the first one and then the last 3 I just really didn't try very hard. Overall, it was a fairly short practice but definitely fairly high intensity.

In any case, tomorrow won't be as hectic as it was today. Monday's are always pretty hectic for me as I have to get everything organized for the upcoming week. I think I'll have a nice rest now....