Tautological Tuesday swimming

Mental insanity is making me crazy!

I was slightly worried that things were beyond even swimming's power to remedy, and in fact it was not a set conducive to great internal delight (several people will be reading below and wondering why in the world I do this by choice!), but about two-thirds of the way down the first length of butterfly on the last set I suddenly felt rather blissful...

I am sick of mental insanity, I am going to do something more productive about it instead of just complaining!

(Actually I spent the first half of the swim thinking about how I might have to switch to a strictly factual mode here at Triaspirational for the next couple weeks, because otherwise I was going to be spouting quantities of grim despair! Hmmm, that was an overly melodramatic thought--I am always so talkative here that even going temporarily laconic would be self-dramatizing in a teenagerish way, arghhh!)

I hope it does not sound as though I am complaining about my job, in fact I have the job that most suits me of all jobs I can possibly imagine and I really love it (had a great class this afternoon BTW), but it goes on a very boom-or-bust cycle--boom-or-bust within the week, and this semester it's the Tuesday-Wednesday bit that's rough, and boom-or-bust within the year, with April as a definite low point. Even at this time of year, I definitely have the time to fit in some 'real' work (i.e. writing of my own), but no resources remaining to dig in on anything new or serious. Combination of exhausted and intellectually understimulated = recipe for utter mental insanity!

(I was having a strong symptom the other day, which I recognized with mild alarm--the deep conviction, which I only barely prevented myself acting upon, that life would be greatly improved if I threw away about 80% of the things in my apartment, including most of the furniture, leaving me with a fairly monastic cell, many fewer books, some lovely empty bookshelf space and a beautiful set of highly organized files. In fact I do not much enjoy tidying up, so I was able to prevent myself from undertaking this project. But I must sit down properly this weekend and sort out a plan to carve out time for some writing, it is all very well channeling all this anxiety into triathlon training but the taper should start next week and I really am going to be going crazy if I do not have something useful and reasonably interesting to do once I cut down training hours!)

All right, now I will get off the soapbox...

Warmup: 700 yards as 100 free, 50 scull, 200 IM, 50 scull, 300 free

First set (modified for me, with goal of working on this problem of left arm being much worse than right re: high/bent elbow, entry, etc.): 8 x 100, odds as right arm, left arm, full catch-up, swim by 25 and evens as free swim focusing on form

Second set (abbreviated/modified also): 3 x 100 IM no free (50 fly on first one, 50 back on second, 50 breast on third--the Jim Bolster style!), with 2 x 50 free on 1:00 in between.

The IM was like a lovely reward for sticking it out through the tedium of the first set...

Total: 2000 yards (hmmm, not bad, I really did feel like I was doing the most negligible and remedial workout compared to everyone in the other lanes, but it is a good time right now to work on technique, small technique improvements over next couple weeks could definitely help my race swim whereas I'm not really going to pick up conditioning-type speed in any way that affects that swim--in fact in general I am still at a stage where technique will affect speed more than almost any imaginable conditioning...)

p.s. In the category of never too late to learn something incredibly obvious and foolish, I announce with relief that I now understand why my bathing cap is constantly slipping off my head, so that at least twice during each workout I have to stop and tug it back lower down on my head. It is not because I have a monstrously large head. (That said, I do have a fairly large head.) It is because bathing caps have an orientation, Coach Henning did a demonstration and showed me that really the Tyr logo has to go on the sides rather than front-back! He expressed remorse for not having thought of this before, since several times he has asked me whether I am having a problem with my bathing cap, but I really thought it was just a problem with the shape and size of my head! ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!