This counts as reading wednesday, right?

[dhampyresa]

The following two questions have been nagging at me since I thought of them while reading. The book titles of the two books are irrelevant, because these questions aren't related to the point of those books. They're just questions that are bugging me.

1. The book indicates an event as happening during "the Jewish Passover". Is this common in English? The author is from the UK. This prasing mirrors the French "la Pâque juive" but I always thought French people added the adjective when necessary because the French for Easter is "Pâques".

2. Which swim stroke do you consider the most complicated? Not the most tiring or your least favourite, but the most complicated. For reference, the Olympic swimming events are: butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle/crawl, but there are other swim strikes. My own answer will be in the comments, so as to not influence people (hopefully).

Comments

[dhampyresa]

OMG YOU DID TRIATHLONS?! Tell me everything!

[isis]

Hee, what do you want to know? The basic story is that when I was a kid I swam competitively (for some aspirational value of competitive) on our town team, when I was in college my boyfriend was a bicycle racer and so I used to ride a lot (he'd go out on a workout ride and then come back and we'd go on an easy ride), and when I was in grad school triathlon was just getting popular, and I figured, I can do 2 out of 3, how hard can running be?

So I did triathlons in the late 1980s, mostly what is now called Olympic distance (1M swim, 25M bike, 10K run) but up to half Ironman. I was pretty good, not great (generally finished in the top 25% and sometimes placed in my age group) mostly because it was just starting out as a sport. I qualified for the nationals and competed one year. But when I moved to Colorado everyone was so good, my placing dropped to about 50% and I also found other things I wanted to do (like rock climbing and mountain biking) so I gave up the triathlon.

Oddly, running was my least favorite and worst sport of the three, but eventually I got really into running and mostly dropped the other two sports (I still mountain bike but I no longer have a road bike, and I swim sometimes for fun but don't do workouts any more) but have done nine marathons and one 50K. How did I become a runner? I don't know! It just happened!