I Have A Short Memory

All week we've had a big debate about where to swim this morning. Our pool is closed now most Fridays (thanks to budget cuts and furlows of city workers, which includes lifeguards) so that's why we've been going to the ocean on Friday mornings. I was hesitant about going back in the ocean though after that nasty man-o-war wrapping I got last week... The welt is pretty much gone but it has left a semi-permanent looking mark... Add to that Mark telling us earlier this week about the recent shark siting at this particular beach and that was IT for me, I wasn't getting back in that water no matter what. Mark was like, "OH it was just a little black tip reef shark..." and I was like, "Yeah, just a little black tip reef shark..."

Given our limited hours available to swim (i.e. early mornings only), our only other logical choice to swim was at one of the military bases that has a longcourse yards pool. Yep. Longcourse yards. Weird, huh? We swam there once a couple weeks ago when our pool was closed for a full week and we needed a pool... it's open super early which is nice, except that it actually means a wake up at 4:30 AM, meet to carpool to the pool at 5:00, arrive to swim 5:30-6:30, home by 7:00. The home by 7 is awesome, the wake up at 4:30 is not. I'm okay with doing that every once in a while, but not on a regular basis and not when I'm just getting over being sick.

So the choice was, wake up at 4:30 and swim where we can be sure we won't get stung/eaten by ocean creatures, or sleep an extra hour and risk it. In the end, sleep won out and we chose to risk it. I suppose I could have just skipped the swim altogether, but given that I have not been training all week I'm starting to go a little nutso and thinking about the half ironman I'm going to do in 2 weeks, well, I'm starting to get antsy about the lack of training time I have put in... I don't feel deathly sick anymore so I got up to swim and risk death that way.

We actually walked down the beach a bit looking for man-o-war that had been washed up on shore. I totally should have done that last week because after my sting while I was walking back along the beach I saw TONS of man-o-war in the sand. From now on I'll be more aware of that as a sign to stay out of the water... this morning we walked for a bit and saw none so after a bit of chit chat about the craziness that we will endure next June at the Couer d' Alene swim start, we dove in and swam.

It really wasn't bad this morning at all. I did feel a man-o-war tentacle wrap around my left wrist at one point, but it must have just been a broken off piece because while it stung, it didn't throw me into shock or anything. Pretty minor. Last week I read all about man-o-war (I googled it while driving home because I wanted to know if it was going to actually kill me.... in retrospect the fact that I was googling anything while driving home would have more likely been my cause of death) and learned that after their tentacles break off they can still sting for up to 24 hours. The one I got today must have broken off yesterday because while the sting was there, it wasn't too bad. The bumps are just now starting to come out on my wrist and itch.

And the water was totally murky for whatever reason this morning so we didn't see any sharks. I guess that doesn't mean they didn't see us. Lol.