on being young

i'm officially young now. eric and i spent some time at the social security office this morning. apparently someone there is very smart and figured out that blaring the news in the waiting area is not a good way to keep people calm and happy. instead they played music that made you feel like you should be looking at fish in an aquarium. hm...wait a second. it was nice actually. we didn't have to wait too long either. i wasn't charged. i just got a plain piece of white paper saying that my name had been changed and that i would get my new identity, i mean social security card, in a couple weeks. now i have to go about the tedious business of changing my name with everyone i know and start getting used to being at the end of the role call.

i got to swim for the first time in an embarrassingly long time this morning. i met up with michelle and a few others at the quarry before the sun came up. the first loop i swam was in the dark, which was particularly interesting because i have dark-tinted goggles. i stayed with someone else who knew where she was going. the next two loops i picked up the pace a little and swam by myself. apparently i have come along way in my fear of open water swimming in freshwater. it was dark outside, the water was dark, my goggles were dark and yet i wasn't really bothered by it. this is good! i swam about 2500m and then called it day. because i haven't swam in awhile i expect that the workout was long enough to make my arms sore tomorrow. we'll see. either way, swimming along reminded me how much i enjoy distance swimming. i'd like to work a couple sessions in the pool into my workout routine again (though its just not the same as open water!).

part of my reasoning for getting in the water is that a friend of mine and eric's was trying to get us to do the splash and dash later this month with him. it will be his first race...and the first race involving swimming i've done in awhile. it should be fun. its on a tuesday night and is a ~750 swim followed by a ~3k run. so basically its going to hurt like crazy because the distances are so short and you're constantly redlining.

i'm thoroughly entrenched in a new book. its called the brain that changes itself by norman doidge. it discusses brain plasticity and how people have overcome injuries, obstacles, learning disabilities or birth conditions by retraining their brain (and their body) to do things, tasks, whatever the previous problem was...for example, people have recovered from strokes to very high degrees with certain types of training. reading this has my head spinning with applications for gait rehabilitation and has me curious about training applications for athletes as well.