About that aqua running

I was greatly relieved the doctor was not convinced I had a stress fracture, but I'm to follow the "pain free principle" until, I suppose, there's no pain. Which means alternatives to running that provide equivalent cardio and muscle work, in addition to physical therapy. One of the best options is deep water (aqua) running.

If you go back a couple years in the blog, you can find a number of entries regarding my "evolving" relationship with swimming as I trained for my first Olympic distance triathlon. For a water sign, swimming has been an acquired taste and part of it's challenge/frustration is that even when I work at it, I don't experience significant improvement. Unlike my experiences with speed/hill work with running and cycling. It's occurring to me as I write that my swimming skills and approach to improving them have some parallels with my relationship skills. I think the solution is that they simply need more work. Been working on that. Now I get a great opportunity to spend more time in the water in a non-swimming way.

Over the summer and into the fall, I fell in love with one of the treasures of Austin, Barton Springs Pool. After 10 years, I finally know it for the gift that it is. It took months of leisurely, non-goal oriented post-run swims to get there. But once I was there, it was like suddenly noticing something really remarkable about someone with whom you've had a casual friendship, and your friendship gets deeper because of this new appreciation and awareness. Good thing we're on such good terms, because I think I will be spending a lot of time there over the next month or so. For the past year I've felt like I've been (slowly) growing into my life; perhaps this is my time to grow into my true water sign-ness. Time to find out if that wetsuit still fits.