Breathe Baby Breathe...

Don't know if you can tell what's going on the picture above, so lemme explain. I took this shot (there's my shadow in the lower right corner) before my 10k last Sunday in Aquatic Park, SF. From a distance it looks like a school of sea lions bathing in the sun. Well, no... it's actually a posse of tri swimmers being coached for an ocean swim. And what I found a bit odd was the coach had them do stomach crunches for a good 10 minutes before the swim. Huh? I've never heard of that, and I don't understand that philosophy other than it's gonna make them really hot and a higher likelyhood to overheat?

So as I was sort of on my tri high horse, thinking this grouped looked a lil' wacko doing planks and crunches in wetsuits. Then I heard the coach talking about the swimming basics, starting with breathing. He said the number one thing you want to remember is to breathe out under the water...In my head I thought 'omg, that's just soooo basic!'. His voiced tapered away as I went on my merry way to warm up/race and that was the end of that.

Until this afternoon when I was doing my own swim workout. I paid attention to my breathing and realized I don't do much breathing out under the water at all. Oh Nelly! Was this really true? I wasn't ever aware of this, and now paying attention, I realized I didn't breathe out nearly as much as I could/should. Uh oh. Then I started laugh breathing at myself while consciously trying to breathe out under the water. Oy. Good to know now before the race eh?

So next time I'm in my wetsuit for an open water race, I'll be the one whose doing PX90 style crunches in it beforehand.

And on a different breathing note, today's (I'll prob close the comments at ~10 pm PST) the last chance for the Athleta giveaway. I'm soo curious who the random number winner will be! I'm using Random.org. I'll announce it tomorrow morning- that is if my kids give me the chance to write. Otherwise, it'll have to wait til the afternoon. Good luck!