Strength, Stretch, Swim..

I've been going easy on the running for over a week. No biking either. I've had a bit of a hip flexor tweak on my left side. I ran a few miles tonight, it seems better but I was pretty slow tonight legs were feeling kind of heavy. Probably because of this thing.

Genine and I went to the gym last night and I was doing squats on this with no extra weight. This thing vibrates all over the place, which causes you to use a bunch more muscles than you typically would doing the exercise regularly. I hadn't used it before, it seems effective.

I've also been working on doing some "Active Stretching". Good article in the NYTimes.
The Scorpion Stretch seems to be a good one for the hip flexors.

Here is a whole series of stretches.

The spider stretch looks like a popular one as well, I can't find a video of that tho.

I have been swimming a lot. Wednesday morning I was swimming with Maija and Claudia. After our warm up we were going to do a 1500m time trial. I had decided that instead of pushing really hard, I would try to stay relaxed and hold form as best I could.
I finished in 29:20 which is my first time under 30 min. The cool part is, not only was it my fastest 1500m to date, it was the most relaxed.
We will be doing this time trial monthly. I feel confident that I will be faster next time.

After the swim I got to the locker room only to find my brain had stopped working. I couldn't remember my combination for my lock!! I have a train to catch, so there is a bit of a time crunch. I seem to remember numbers easily, I can still phone most of my friends from High School without looking up their numbers. Only they don't live at home anymore. So it would be nice if I could forget those. I also have a couple checking account numbers, I can rattle those off.... Because I'm the "buyer" at work I can read off our credit card account number off the top of my head, plus dates and security codes... I don't try to memorize these things it just happens.
Anyhow, so here I am standing at my locker thinking I'm going to have to go wait in the lobby in my swim suit and ask Claudia or Maija to drive me home so that I can change and go to work. Oh man that would be embarrassing!
Finally I remember that I had some sort of word association that went along with the combination that I hadn't even thought about since I first bought the lock. It worked. Whew! All is good, I made my train.

When I tell Genine about this, she reminds me that she doesn't have any trouble remembering her combination to her master lock. She's had the same lock since 7th grade (1982). I think Master Lock should be calling her for an advertisement of some sort right?