Healthy Lifestyle | Life is Balance

I love to swim. Ever since my dad taught me to swim when I was 5, I’m most at home in the water. When I was younger, I used to race. I was on my summer swim club’s swim team and later, in camp I was known for my speed. Other kids excelled at softball or archery. I won races. I no longer swim to compete however. I swim for exercise and to relax. There is nothing like a long swim to stretch out my muscles after a long day. What is nice about swimming, is that you use all your muscle, with little or no stress or impact to your joints. My usual routine is to swim a little over a mile in the pool. In the pool at my gym, Asphalt Green, this is about 72 laps (or lengths of the 25 yard lanes). This takes me between 40-50 minutes, depending on how I am feeling.

If you’d like to calculate how many laps you need to swim a mile, here is how I did it:
1 mile = 1,760 yards
pool length = 25 yards (pool lengths vary so be sure to ask how long yours is)
1760/25= 70.4 lengths

I swim back and forth repeating the lap number in my head so I can keep track, boring, right? Not since I discovered the waterproof headphones and ipod case that attaches to my goggle strap. I have lots of songs programmed into my ipod shuffle, which makes my swim ever so much more enjoyable! This is the same system that Olympic champions, Natalie Coughlin and Michael Phelps helped to design and both use for their workouts.

Want to know what I listen to while I swim? Here’s a sampling of one of my playlists:

Get Your Own Free Hypster.com Playlist.

The symbol on the image above is the Life is Balance® swim design. I am gearing up to having that design available on t-shirts in the next couple of months. Sign up for our newsletter and like us on Facebook for access to our sales, Fan-only coupons and be the first to know when new styles are available!

I haven’t had much time over the past two weeks to update. Packing up my office and renovating my apartment and then moving everything into such a small space was a challenge (both physically and emotionally). In a perfect world the painter would have been finished when he was supposed to (the Friday before the actual move). But, in true Murphy Brown form, he seemed to be living with me for an extra week. So while I would have liked for the painting to be finished before all the work boxes got delivered, that was not to be.

The Friday before my move my brother Neil , along with a few of my good guy friends (Tasso, Dave, Harvey & Alan) came over to put my new Ikea furniture together. It took 5 guys from 2:00pm till midnight to get all the pieces in the right places! Ikea furniture: $1,043.00; Pizza: $25 Friends & Family who can use an allen wrench: PRICELESS!

On Monday morning another friend, Frank picked me up on his motorcycle to go get the UHaul van that I had rented. Yes, me on a motorcycle! If I thought moving all my 15 years worth of work stuff into my tiny apt was scary, I clearly hadn’t ridden on the back of a motorcycle down the FDR Drive before!

In less than two hours, Frank and I had the UHaul loaded and ready to roll by the time Tasso & Neil arrived to escort us back uptown to unload. When I saw all the new boxes filling up my living room I thought I would melt down right then and there. But, now a week and a half later, almost everything has either found a place, been thrown away, or is heading off to my storage room. My work space is set up and I’m open for business! I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel! All that’s left to do is to hang my pictures, buy some more lighting, counter stools and maybe a new couch in time.

Now maybe I can start to enjoy the summer!

Here are some photos (before, during and almost done)