Day Four- Cleanse-Irritation Nation

Well, it's inevitable that some irritation sinks in during the cleanse. I'm not your typical big ball of sunshine to begin with, I know well enough, but this is different.

I usually try to get some decent sleep on the cleanse, but I was up until about 12:30 playing computer games. I slept in a lot, until well after 6, but, well I came into work to a pretty full load of new problems and it wasn't long before I started to just feel extremely irritated. The usual office contributors- emails and a seemingly constantly ringing phone- made me decide around 10 am (after my apple/peanut butter) to go visit some classrooms that needed some attention. That was a good move, do some solitary work.

I hit the pool at noon. If you've been reading my blog (and that would make you probably the first person to ever do so), you know I ran down a guy on a mountain bike the other day out on a run. Let me me the first to say that my running and my swimming are not in synch. After about five laps, a woman got in the lane next to me. She had her water and her flip-card workout and she got in and proceeded to toast my ass. Granted, she was doing a workout and she'd stop after a few laps for a brief rest, but when she was swimming, she was making me look developmentally disabled.

I was trying to stay focused on my own swimming by rolling my eyes up in my head so I can't see the other lanes and telling myself my training is different and that I'm doing endurance swimming. But the truth is that unlike when I run, there really aren't many other gears I can call on. There's no swimming down a better swimmer for me. I have maybe two gears, one in which I swim slowly, and one where I swim marginally faster and use twice as much energy.

Although I did outswim the woman in my last five laps, it because she was doing some soft of backstroke that I don't even know the name of. Now I know my ego is a limiting factor, and nowhere more so than in the water. I have no business even looking at what's going on in other lanes until I better sort out what's going on in mine.

I will say that when I got out of the pool, my muscles felt warm and happy and the drive back to work (and lunch !) was short and sweet, and my morning irritation had faded. Here I am on day four, and looking forward to 1 and 1/4 cups of whole wheat pasta !