Swimming and Muscles

I'll be heading to Israel in JUST A FEW DAYS to race the swim portion of the 2014 Israman Negev half iron distance race (being sent there by the good people at Kinetis), and therefore I've been swimming a bit more to be ready.

I haven't done a lot of speed work - I've mainly been doing longer swims to make sure I'm comfortable going the distance. I did 2 longer swims this week (2160 and 2300 yds), and I did 4x400 in a 20 yard pool last week. Before that, I did a few 1600 tempo swims, and a few more swims around 2000 yards. My speed is lacking, but I should be fine covering the 1900 yards in the Red Sea.

In the last 30 days, I've swam 15,410 yards, which is GREAT for me! It started with the 100 yard swim-off against Devon, and then I really kept hitting the pool for longer workouts. In fact, if the last 30 days were their own month (Dec 12th - Jan 11th), it would have been my 5th biggest swimming month in my recorded history (back through Sept 2009)!! Here's a month-by-month graph from my training log:

The top 4 months of swimming were all in mid-2010 as I was setting a 2:15 Oly PR.

(In that graph, you can also see when Henry came in mid-2011 and I stopped doing anything but running with him. You can also see "the cliff" when I got injured in early September 2013 and stopped doing anything... and that's when I started swimming a lot!)

Finally, all the PT exercises that I'm doing in order to get back to running have been putting a little meat on my chicken legs (especially the squats, 1-legged squats, and eccentric quad work). This is an un-Photoshopped photo of my quad from a day ago:

See that lump to the right of that image? Yeah, I didn't used to have that muscle.
And the other skinner lump on top of my leg? Yep, that's new too.

Off to do some final packing for Israel. I'm not sure how much I'll be posting while I'm there, but check back for updates here on my blog, on my Twitter page, and on my Instgram. Posts may be happening at strange times being I'll be 8 hours ahead there.