The last few days have been rather productive for me, fitness-wise at least.  On Thursday I swam 2200 yards, which is a new record for me.  Yeah, I've only been swimming for a month or so, so it's not like this is some major accomplishment.  But it's about a mile and a quarter, and it's a distance that seemed extreme to me not too long ago.  I'm slow and I have bad form, but I made it.

 

Then on Saturday, I went to Manhattan for a bike ride.  I like to ride around Manhattan because there's plenty to see there, and I go there with my bike about once a year.  Last year on July 4 I had done a ride thru all 5 boroughs of NYC, and that ride had totalled about 55 miles.  This time I wanted to surpass that distance.

 

I took the train in, and began to ride around the outside of the island on the Waterfront Greenway, which is a path that encircles most of the island.  There's constuction at various points, which makes it a little annoying.  And the path just ends at the upper East Side for a few miles.  But it was to have a bike path for much of that loop. 

 

After completing the loop, which was about 32 miles, I headed inland and began to zig zag around Manhattan, just packing on mileage.  By the time I finally made it to the train, and gotten back to my car in Hoboken NJ, I had managed 60.8 miles.  Here's a map of the route I took.  So it was a new biking distance record, just two days after my swimming distance record.  I'm very pleased with that.

 

And then on Sunday, I attempted a run, which would be my first run in over 11 weeks.  I loaded the baby into the jogging stroller and taken her for a walk, a portion of which I picked up the pace to a jog. It was probably less than a mile at about a 10:00 pace, I'd guess. And the ankle felt fine. So it wasn't much of a run, but it's more than I've done in a long time.  And this makes me as happy as either the swim or the ride.

 

In other news, Jillian definitely has a tooth coming in now.  She'll have a whole head full of them soon, I'm sure...

There's been a bit going on around here.  As I mentioned in my last post, I was in California for a few days last week at a conference for work.  I did manage to get one day by myself out there.  I spent that day cruising around the L.A. area.  One thing I did was visit Griffith Park on Sunday, which was the day of the fire at Universal Studios.  I took a picture of myself from the Park (click on the image for a larger view).  In the background, you can see the Hollywood sign, and the smoke from the fire coming over the mountain.

 

This first day was quite relaxing.  It was not a bad thing that I had 24 hours of free time in southern California.  But once the conference got started, I was pretty busy.  And that's fine.  I learned a lot, and that's the point.

 

This past Saturday, after I returned from CA, Maggie and I went to the Belmont to watch Big Brown try for the Triple Crown.  For many years, I had been thinking that it would be really cool to watch a horse win a Triple Crown in person.  As most people know, 11 times in the last 30 years a horse has gone to the Belmont with a chance for a Triple Crown.  I don't know much about horse racing, but I know that the Belmont is a lot different than the Kentucky Derby and the Prekaness because of the length of the race.  In most of the recent years when a horse was going for the Triple Crown, I personally didn't give the horse much of a chance.  The only time I really thought one of these horses was going to win was Smarty Jones in 2004.  But even he couldn't do it.  Maggie and I had thought about going that year, but decided against it basically because of a crummy weather forecast. 

 

This year, however, I bought into the hype about Big Brown.  I really thought he was going to do it.  So I wanted to make sure we'd be a part of it.  Obviously I was wrong.  Nonetheless, I am glad that I finally saw a Belmont Stakes race.  Belmont Park was basically a dump.  It was crowded, and hot and dirty.  And of course we didn't see a Triple Crown.  But we had fun anyway.  Will I ever go again in an attempt to see a Triple Crown winner?  I'm not sure.  Maybe.

 

In other news, I had my next appt with the doc today about my ankle.  He gave me good news and bad news.  The good news is that he says everything has been healing just fine. And that I'm almost 100% back to normal.

The bad news is the word "almost".  He said I should go another 2-3 weeks without running. Ugh. He said I don't need another appointment with him. So I asked when I'd know when I'm able to run. He just told me to mark my calendar for 2-3 weeks, and give it a go then. Well okay. 2 weeks from now is June 23, and 3 weeks is June 30. I guess my next run will be sometime between then...

He did clear me for anything else: biking, elliptical... basically anything non-contact. So I went out for a 10 mile bike ride, which is at least something.