Today, I made it to the afternoon swim with the masters group at the Pier Beach. We do buoy patterns on Sundays. So you go out to a buoy, turn on it, back to start, out to another, etc. I'm in the middle of the hour long workout in choppy, small swell ocean and all of a sudden on my inside shoulder I see a red sail. no kiddding. A small red sailboat had come inside the gorup of about 30-40 swimmers that we had out there.  Hmmm...

So I come out of the water and my sone and older daughert are there at the edge jumping and screamng for me to pick them up and "jump" them over the waves (lift them). O.K. My shoulders are burning, I;m dying for a drink of water and here I am at the water's edge lifting a combined 70-80 lbs over the waves. I enjoyed it tons, and nothing makes me laugh and smile like my kids, but man, just aminute to recover...

We stayed for a bit longer in the water, which is prime for swimming or lounging in these days, and this also helped the ridiculous case of Poison Ivy that I knowingly caught on the top of my left foot. Yeah Yeah. I know. What the hell are you doing Poison Ivy removal in Flip Flops for?? Well, here it is in brief. The last few weeks I noticed one renegade strand of P.I. coming through the stone wall. I kept thinking I've got to get that before it really gets a foot hold on this side fo the yard. So, finally last weekend, I had a few minutes while watching the two older kids in the yard to pull it out. I grabbed my gloves and got it carefully and pulled it out and threw it over the wall. No worries, then I clipped back a couple of branched to discourage the mosquitos, which will ineveitably be carrying some deadly virus in afew weeks.. Wait a minute is that another strand of Ivy there witha root growing under that moss, now 5 or six feet into my yard. NO #$%^&ing WAY! Out it goes and more and still more. Carefully removed and then a real long strand and, oh sh%t, did that root just drag across my foot.  Son of a )(*&&! You guessed it. So, the end of the week I had a forced hiatus from cycling and running. Couldn't get a shoe on. Back to training for a fall marathon this week....

Later, MW