Found!

The main swim set today was all freestyle and with fins:
1.  4x100yds, breathing on the right side for one lap and on the left side for the next lap
2.  3x150yds, first and third 150yds breathing on your "bad" side and second 150yds breathing on your "favorite" side
3.  2x200yds, first breathing on your "bad" side and second breathing on your "favorite" side
4.  2x150yds, first breathing on your "bad" side and second breathing on your "favorite" side
5.  4x100yds, breathing every third stroke

Usually, I am excited about swimming with fins, but today's workout might make me think twice.  The alternating side breathing is not too bad for me, although I generally breathe on my left side.  Fins are fun because you get to swim FAST, but it comes at a price--fins require more oxygen and leave you breathless.  I also tend to underestimate my speed as I come into the wall so by the time I do a flip turn, I am practically on the wall.  And Marcia was telling me, "Streamline, streamline!"  Like rowing where we have to practice and focus on holding our technique, swimming requires you to hold your core tight and your body in a streamline position, head down, as you push off the wall.  I am usually busy looking at the swimmer ahead and hold my head up in quite a non-aerodynamic fashion--it is no wonder I am not fast!

I have a confession to make.  Last night after practice, I went to Trader Joe's.  As my husband reminded me when I got home, that was four grocery trips in five days.  To be fair, I went to TJ's for race food--apples, crackers, Lavabars--for San Diego, but I did also look to see if they had any yams.  Nope, they had pitiful bags of sweet potatoes, but no yams.  Want to know the difference between sweet potatoes and yams?  Try here.  From reading the article, it actually looks like what I have been eating are sweet potatoes.  Either way, none of it was PURPLE!  None of it was this!

Call me crazy, but today I made one last ditch effort to find this elusive purple yam.  For those of you who are keeping count, yes, this is five grocery trips in six days.  (If you are counting my trips, does this mean you are also a stroke counter in the boat?  For non-rowers, stroke counters are rowers who count strokes to help pass the boredom during long rows or to help mentally cope with the pain during races.) 

I went to Ranch 99, a chain Chinese grocery store, and easily found what I was looking for.  It was almost surreal.  The purple yams were just sitting in the middle of the produce isle, waiting for me to pick them up.  Counter to what I thought before, they are actually a tan color on the outside and the skin only turns dark purple when cooked. 

One bag of two of purple yams

Uncooked: light brown on the outside, purple on the inside

I picked up those purple yams--two bags or a total of 14 pounds of them.  I am pretty sure that no normal person would buy 14 pounds of yams or sweet potatoes at one time, but at the store, I was suddenly overcome by this concern that maybe tomorrow, the price of orange yams would suddenly skyrocket and then, all the purple yam farmers would stop producing purple yams and start growing orange yams.  In that light, it made perfect sense to stock up on purple yams.  My distressed husband assured me that the price of yams would not change overnight and that you cannot even trade yams on the stock market, but you can trade corn, wheat, soy beans, oats, paddy rice, milk, and hogs on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Cooked: Brownish-purple on the outside, dark purple on the inside

I am sure that one day, maybe in a not-so-distant future, I will get tired of these yams.  For now, even if the purple yams do not taste as great as I remembered, I am not going to admit it because then, there is no possibility of luring my husband into helping me eat 14 pounds of yam.