My last post was about the prospect of our pools shutting down again due to the worsening pandemic. I said if that happened, I'd take dryland workouts more seriously than before. And that's still true. However, my wife doesn't handle the word "no" very well, so when the governor's orders came down, closing all fitness centers as of Saturday morning, she went on the search for alternatives. She found the Aquatics Center at Mylan Park outside Morgantown, WV. It is a new facility where the swim teams at WVU compete, and the competition pool is open a lot of hours to the public each week. West Virginia is so far not experiencing the surge of coronavirus (and it's a more conservative state), so its facilities are still open. Further, Pennsylvania travel restrictions allow for trips out of state if they are for less than 24 hours. So, we went. Admittedly, we are still supposed to reduce non-essential travel, and this excursion doesn't qualify as "essential," no matter how my wife tries to parse it. Nevertheless, from a public health perspective, the Morgantown area has fewer cases of COVID-19 than our home county, so what we did was relatively safe.
So now that I've gotten that off my chest (I'm a stickler for rules and feel bad if I don't follow them), let me tell you a couple more things about this workout. First, the day became frustrating when, after a 1.3 hour car trip, I sat in the driver's seat in the parking lot and stretched my back. It was a natural thing to do, but when I did, I felt a pop and knew immediately that I had torn a muscle fiber in my upper back. This is a chronic injury that happens an average of once per year. My last incidence was more than a year and a half ago, so I guess it was time. Sometimes the injury is so severe that it keeps me in bed for days afterward. More recently, the injuries are mild and only sideline me for a day or two. The problem is, I never know which kind of injury it is until the next day.
I didn't know if I could swim, but I tried and it worked. I was very gentle and didn't do any flip turns, nor did I stretch my arms out front like I have been trying to do. A day later (as I write this), i can report that my injury was mild and I can return to working out tomorrow. Yay!
The facility is an exceptional one. It is smaller than the Spire Institute in Ohio, but seems to be built for the same kind of swimmers: high-caliber competitive athletes. Olympians would be comfortable training there, as the pool is state of the art, best I can tell.
As I said, I didn't do any hard swims there, and regardless of my back injury I hadn't intended to. This day was supposed to be a long run on my workout calendar. I wanted to accommodate my wife on this spur-of-the-moment trip, so I just figured I'd do a treadmill run at home when we returned. I didn't. You see, this day (yesterday) was the very last day of my maintenance training plan. I've been following Phil Mosley's 12-week triathlon intermediate maintenance plan, and it ended today. This was to get me fit enough to start serious Ironman training for IMLP in July 2021. I've now purchased the 30-week advanced masters long-course training plan, and that will start at the end of this month. Therefore, I'm in-between plans, and so today, as I'm recovering from the muscle pull, I did no workouts! I actually felt fidgety, which is a good sign. I'm looking forward to more training. Despite what I sometimes write, it's the training that is really my favorite part of this ironman life.
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