On 2009!! (And cross training)

Happy New Year everyone! Last year Lesley and I went to Boston for a day, this year we stayed home and to be honest, home is a better place.

Nobody commented on my last reader question which is a little disappointing. In one of the books I am currently reading (The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche) Langewiesche notes that a reporter for a particular periodical that reports on potential violations of the NPT gets very little feedback from his readers. It turns out that while the reporter is very widely read by people in the field these people often have security clearance and would even deny reading these articles if asked.

I would like to stress, here there is no security violation by publishing in this blog. There is a risk, particularly if the post is anonymous, of the post being summarily removed, but there is no risk in telling me how much you (don't?) enjoy reading what I have to say. Readers can be confident that their posts will remain in the strictest of confidence because hardly anyone ever reads this blog. :-P

Anyway today I had to run through the Hudson Bay store downtown, I had to deposit a cheque in the CIBC machines. As I was charging around the store dodging in and out of the crowd I noticed that I was using a cross-over to make turns on a sharp angle. That is to say, if I had to turn left I would throw my right foot clear over and to the left of my left foot forcing me to do a near 90 degree turn without loosing momentum.

It dawned on me, I was good at that from skating then I thought to myself, maybe I should use skating for cross training, heck it would improve my balance and co-ordination. I put more thought into the idea and came up with a better idea, I should swim more. After all I am not cross training for running through The Bay, maybe a Triathlon, most likely a pure road race, but not a department store sprint.

There is a pool just down the street from home and the great thing about swimming is that you cannot hurt yourself if you swim intelligently. Skaters crash and hurt themselves all the time, but an endurance swimmer cannot possibly crash, even if they hit someone else at full speed, well full speed is a slow walking speed, how could that hurt? The great thing about swimming is it forces you to breath properly and make the most effective use of your lung capacity, that and since I don't want to spend money, the other great thing is, swimming is basically free, I am not going to buy a Michael Phelps Speedo LZR swim suit, I'll make do on my old lifeguard bathing suit and do lengths during the free length swims, assuming there are such things.

Of course if I did swim, Lesley would probably come to watch and then she would laugh at me and say I look like silly. Maybe I should run instead?

I could start a survey, how should Michael cross-train, swim, skate, run, ride more baby! Any other suggestions before I put out a survey?