Swimming be hard

After all my Body Pumping last week, I swore I'd continue to go at least twice a week at least until Nicole's wedding so I could get jacked for my bridesmaid's dress. 

FAIL. 

Already skipped it once this week. Yesterday I was desperately craving a run to redeem myself from Saturday's fun but slow run. I'm also a huge "me time" person and after spending every waking second Fri-Sun surrounded by (super cool) people, the thought of listening to the instructor yell under the florescent lights was just too much for me. 

This leads to a bit of a conundrum - I want to have buff biceps but I want to somehow get them by running every day. Ideas?

The logical solution would have been to go and just do arm weights at the gym today, but that wasn't working for me either. I decided to try to get the best of both world's and work my arms by swimming, which would also count as pre-training for my triathlon in August, which is coming up pretty fast. I found this 12 week training plan of swim workouts for sprint triathlons, so I thought I'd sort of use stuff from it loosely until I officially start training.

I ended up doing 6 laps as a warmup (is going down a lap? or is it down and back? I call going down a lap but tell me if I'm wrong) then 15*50meters (look I'm learning swim terminology!) with 20 seconds rest in between and a 6 lap cooldown. FYI to myself: I did 10*50m in 15:15.

So the 15*50 is approximately three quarters of the distance I'll be swimming in open water in August and based on today's performance, I WILL DROWN.

Seriously that was some hard sh!t. Sorry for cursing but I need to convey the seriousness of this situation. I was basically exhausted after each 50m, and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting 20 seconds, or any rest whatsoever during the tri until I get to shore. I need to truly commit to swimming at least once a week until official training starts (I think June?) and then follow my training plan religiously (luckily this is a strong point for crazy type A people like me). So now it's on the internet, so it's happening. 

Other problems that I have: Some people leave the water looking like this:

And I leave the water looking like this:

I really look frightening after swimming, I had GIANT fire engine red lines where my googles and swim cap were. I would have taken a picture but they faded a bit by the time I got home. No one else at the YMCA looks like this, so clearly I'm doing something wrong, but what? Any swimmer readers out there who can help me? 

On the bright side, I got up at the same time that I normally do to go to the gym, but my utter lack of stamina in the pool meant I only swam for about 35 minutes, so I had time to do some grad work and clean the kitchen counters before school (and write this post! and I even washed my hair!).