I Don't Get Butterflies

Completing a tough swim workout is like eating a big Chinese meal. You'll be so overly-satiated when it's done that your entire body will hurt. Yet two hours later it's like it never happened.

This morning's swim was just like a mega-Chinese meal, complete with shrimp fried rice, orange chicken, lo mein noodles, szechuan beef and a healthy dollop of won ton soup to wash it all down and leave barely enough room for the fortune cookie. Though you somehow manage to eat two of them anyway.

That's how the swim workout felt. It was jam packed with 100 yard sprints and 50 yard sprints and so little rest that every 10 second moment of peace I had to recover was spent panting and swearing and wondering if my lo-mein arms would fall off into the won ton pool.

I kinda lost count of my splits for the 100s and most of the 50s because the rest time was so short my watch wouldn't register the lap times. However, I was able to clock in a few of them and guestimate the others and, I gotta admit, I was going pretty fast for me. In fact, somewhere around the eighth 100 yard repeat, I hit the wall at a personal record setting 1:24.7. I've never swum 100 yards faster than 1:25. Those .3 seconds were huge for me. They still are. Which is probably why I'm telling you about it.

Of course, Michael Phelps just swam the 200 meter butterfly in 1:52.

Punk.

I told my mother about Michael Phelps' 200 meter butterfly time and compared it to my 100 yard freestyle time to try to explain to her how friggin fast that kid swims.

Well you're not too far off his time, she said.

Yeah, I don't think you get it, ma. You see, he's going twice as fast as me all the while swimming a stroke that's supposed to be a lot slower.

She looked at me with a bit of confusion. Or maybe it was lack of caring. Like a good mother, she'd rather believe I was the world record holder. Still, I wanted to get my point across...

I pointed to the other end of the room. It's like if Michael Phelps and I both raced to the other side of this room, I explained. It's only 15 feet, it only takes 2 seconds to get there, and he'd still beat me by at least 1 second. He's that fast, the little so-and-so.

Of course, today I heard that Michael Phelps swims 8 to 10 miles per day. Every day. That's crazy. No wonder he's so fast. I suppose if I started swimming 8 to 10 miles per day that I could swim the 200 meter butterfly in....um...... uh.....in....... well, I couldn't. Butterfly is one of those strokes that is not in my extremely limited swimming repertoire. In fact, whenever my workout calls for a 400 meter IM, I really only do three strokes and toss in a double scoop of freestyle.

After all, when am I going to actually swim the butterfly in a triathlon? The answer is, I'm not. Never. Sure I've been known to do a few breast strokes here and there. And I'm not opposed to flopping on my back if need be in a tiring, stressful moment. But butterfly? Bitch please.

Butterfly is up there with flip-turns. I've refused to learn how to do a flip-turn because swimmers do flip-turns. I'm not a swimmer, I'm a triathlete. Big difference, bucko. Us triathletes, we don't do flip-turns and we definitely don't do butterflies.

Lo mein, though. We like lo mein.