Tuesday swimming

Hmmm, and I am smitten with guilt, I got home too late to do even half an hour on the bike--I spent the first ten minutes of swimming (very wintry mix out there tonight, took twice as long as usual to get over there, so that annoyingly I only had time for a very short warmup!) thinking I should really have stayed at home and done an hour of cycling instead.

(No run either, arghhh, bad time management and organization on my part--hmmm, have just deleted much longer spell of self-reproach, it is not edifying. Will hope to get back on track tomorrow.)

Not a bad swim, but not blissful. Really the good ones for me involve my excessive and restless thinking finally sort of temporarily shutting off and letting me concentrate on the workout, this was not one of those, I was having a sequence of minor and not very interesting insights that would not stop, arghhh! I do not know, either, that I can quite reconstruct the details of what I did, I never quite mentally grasped it in the first place (there was one too few copies for each lane to have one, I was not able to ponder it and let it sink in) and my mind was racing around too much on other questions...

Warmup: 1 x (25 breast 50 back 75 freestyle catchup 100 IM? I am completely making up details, I cannot remember at all--should have been 3 x but as I say I was late... call it 250 of non-wintry mix)

First set (which I did not even have time to finish):

8 x 50 (even free, odd back)
6 x 100 (50 breast, 50 free no kick--took me 2:05, did it on 2:20)
4 x 150 IM drill-stroke by 25

(Corrected--couldn't remember at first--this I think is right though, and the last bit of the set would have been 2 x 200 free, that makes sense now, I am sorry I did not have time to do it though.)


I guess I did 1800 or 2000, something like that. Or maybe there was no something else and it was only 1650. [Ed. No, it was 1850, that's right.] I felt very, very slow.

Pointless insights:

1. I am so tired by the end of the day on Tuesdays this semester that I cannot expect to have a great swim.

2. I need to get there on time, because the bad thing today was that it was a bit more crowded than usual, though we were still able to split lanes, and I ended up splitting with a considerably faster fellow in a middle lane. Obviously bad to get used to any one spot, good to shake it up, but I really like having a nice quiet berth in one of the two slowest lanes, whereas in this spot I was surrounded on all sides by considerably faster swimmers, very bad for my morale...

3. I like the actual backstroke, but I slow down almost to a standstill as I feel around with my hand for the wall, and then it takes me forever to get myself reoriented in the other direction! This must be a target for improvement, even though in substantive respects there are more pressing things to work on (flip turns, breathing, freestyle technique more generally), because it makes my backstroke times also incredibly bad for my morale...

There were others, but that is quite enough, really. In sum: more than tolerable, by the end my backstroke felt pretty decent, but this day has gone on too long already!