Splish Splash

Well I’m glad to have put a nice big check mark beside each workout on last week’s training calendar. It was nice to be back into a routine and also nice to start building into things at a reasonable pace.

I will admit I had a few moments of beating up on myself (emotionally) early in the week as I felt a large amount of frustration in the pool. My first pool workout included a timed 400, something that in the past has come easy to me (and so it should), yet this time around it felt extremely labored. I was completely out of rhythm and anything but smooth in the water. My shoulders were tight and I couldn’t help but feel like everything I had last May had somehow gone completely out the window... and *gasp* Kirsten kicked my butt! I know this was my first real swim workout in a while, but still, you have certain expectations for yourself and when you fail to meet those expectations it kind of takes the wind out of your sails.

Thankfully, I had some good easy runs and was able to spin away some frustrations on the bike. Also, my second swim workout of the week went a little better than the first. It was kind of a funny one, in that, when I first looked at the workout I thought “hmm, this should be easy” as it had lots of short fast efforts (nothing more than 100m, each with a 20 second rest in between). But, wow, I was wrong - easy it was not! As I hit the wall on the last effort of my second (and last) set, the words “thank god that is over” came shooting out of my mouth… and yet it still felt better than the other day. I focused on not over thinking things (something I do too much of), on really lengthening out my stroke and just staying relaxed. Shane once said to me "swimming seems a lot like golf, when you try and kill it, the ball goes nowhere, you do so much better if you just swing easy".

Last night I took another crack at the workout with the timed 400. I approached it with the 'swing easy' mentality and you know, it was better... good almost. I'm still not quite as quick as I would like to be, but my stroke didn't feel like some crazy wind-up toy on the verge of a breakdown and I think I may have actually looked somewhat smooth moving down the lane. On top of that, I cut 10 seconds of my time from last week which is definitely encouraging.

Oh, and I finally got a new set of goggles... heaven!