I added 100 metres to my time this morning:
1. Front crawl : 200 metres
2. Breast stroke: 200 metres
I am going to try for 500 metres next week.
My longer-term goal is to try for 1 kilometre. Once that’s done, I’ll try for 1 kilometre without resting. Once that’s completed, I will work on improving my time.
Today was my first day of weightlifting. I have only about half an hour, so can only do 1 set for each exercise. I guess rather than doing the same exercises once every three times to the gym, I could go to four, reduce the number of exercises I do each day, and increase the number of sets. With going to the gym every other day though, it would be about a week and a half between the times I do the same exercises.
Instead, I just increased my weights from the last time I worked out, and bumped up the reps to 15.
What I used to do was 4 sets of 12, 10, 8, 6 reps, and decreasing weight with each one. given my time restrictions, I think this will work.
Anyhow, here are the exercises I did today. I worked my arms and shoulders.
1. Hammer curl: 20 lb
2. Tricep pull down: 40 lb
3. Concentration curl: 20 lb
4. Tricep extension: 20 lb
5. Wrist extension: 20 lb
6. Military press: 50 lb
7. Reverse fly: 45 lb
8. Lateral raise: 12.5 lb
9. Shrug: 40 lb
10. Dumbell press: 20 lb
11. Front raise: 10lb
I think next time I need to increase weights for the military press and reverse fly. Maybe the wrist extension as well. It was slightly too easy.
I was right about Tuesdays and Thursdays being shorter lanes. They were 25 metre lanes today,which was nice. It gave me more opportunity to rest between laps and to complete a lap before needing to rest. I am definitely switching swimming to Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Here are my results:
Front crawl: 150 m
Breast stroke: 150 m
I did less length on the front crawl, but more on the breast stroke, and I increased my total by 50 metres. I think my technique was a bit better today, but that may have been just because the lanes are shorter. I need to figure out how to kick properly.
I started going back to the gym today. I had been going until 2004 when I started biking to work. When my knees gave out a year later, our daughter was born and my wife switched her gym time to the mornings. At first, I stayed at home to take care of our daughter when she woke up. then I ended up enjoying the extra 1.5 hours of sleeping time.
In the last week or so, I’ve been thinking I should go back to the gym. So, after some thought, I figured if I got up with my wife and dressed, ate, and whatnot while she was gone, I could go as soon as she got home.
Today was the first day. It went fairly well. I started with swimming. I decided to do swimming Monday, Wednesday, and Friday because I thought they had shorter lanes those days. Unfortunately, those days are full-length lanes. I still swam though. Here’s what I did:
Front crawl: 200 m
Breast stroke: 50 m
I think I am going to switch to Tuesdays and Thursdays for swimming since they have shorter lanes, so I can rest more often until I can build up some endurance. I’ll reserve Monday, Wednesday and Friday for weight training.
I’ll try to post my progress here.
One thing I noticed while watching videos online (YouTube, MetaCafe, Google Video, etc) is that there is rarely any text accompanying the video. It isn’t much of an issue if it’s a prank video or a Japanese game show, but when there’s a lot of speaking parts, there’s rarely any captioning.
I wonder what hearing impaired people do. Do they have software that automatically close caption the audio? If not, they must feel left out.
This is the fourth part of the difference between series.
One of the most common grammatical mistakes I see is using it’s instead of its. Or vice versa. Telling the difference is really easy actually.
It’s is a contraction. A contraction is a word formed by omitting or combining some of the sounds of a longer phrase. Other examples include won’t, can’t, shouldn’t.
In this case, it’s actually means “it is”.
Its, on the other hand, is the possessive form of “it”. In other words, it is used to speak of something that belongs to something else (e.g. its ball, its doghouse, its wings).
Let me know if you have any grammar questions, and I’ll be sure to post the question and answer here.
