The last two weeks have been really up and down, swimming-wise. I felt better after resting over Thanksgiving, but almost immediately felt worse (overtrained, annoyed at the world for no good reason… and sometimes good reason). And I’m feeling a lot better now, but my shoulder is at the beginning of trouble. Luckily, as I told an awesome guy willing to discuss it with me last night – there is no reason I can’t take it easy right now. And the advantage of age is that I might be wise enough to do so.
I had a great swim (they always seem great afterwards) at 53 degrees (or possibly below) on Sunday.
I did make the mistake of getting in a bit tooo slowly, so my feet got pretty cold and never warmed up again. It’s a fine line between getting in comfortably and failing to generate enough heat at the outset. Luckily the outside temperature was great. But 40 minutes definitely felt like enough. (I would have gone longer, but it’s probably good that I didn’t 🙂
Looking over the last two weeks, most of my journal is complaining about being tired. That pretty much sums it up. Here’s one day that has a good video:
Tuesday 8 December
I went to the beach on Sunday, but don’t have pics or video – it was beautiful but cold. Air temp around 50, water temp around 61 or 62. I only got to swim for about an hour, and my swimming felt very average, but the acclimitization felt good. Better some than none, I figure.
I’m coming out of my “overtrainedness.” Doing everything half-assed seems to be working. So with that in mind, I’m not going to post online today since it would require revisions I don’t feel like doing right now. I’ll strive for perfection when my energy comes back 🙂 In seriousness, I do feel like I’ve had a good revelation about it being OK to just do things, not to strive at them. I will always, always, feel like I should be doing more, and I think it’s OK to have some times where it is actually possible to check off all of the tasks you set for yourself. I know I feel good at the end of the day when I do. And I do not need to worry about not challenging myself. At 43, I think it’s safe to say that challenging myself is an integral part of my makeup.
Coach Bescher pointed out last week that I have a year and a half to train (since I pushed the swim to 2022) – I need to get over the feeling that I need to make every. workout. count. I’m driving myself crazy… for no good reason and with 21 months to go. If I keep this up I will burn out. And I won’t enjoy myself, which is the whole point.
Off to postpone some emails about things I don’t really need to do 🙂
I got to swim (tethered) in the snow last night – it was awesome:
So as of today, December 15th:
My shoulder was bothering me on the tether last night. I went super, super slow (drilling more than swimming) and tried to find a recovery position that didn’t make things in my shoulder crackle and pop. I was middling successful. I talked to Eugene about it (and the funny shoulder bump). His analysis was inflammation, which is unsurprising. My training is insane – sometimes and don’t get to, which means that whenever I do, I jump on it. I’m like a sin wave of swim training, which I would recommend to absolutely no one. I’ll try taking it even easier than I did last week… if that’s even possible.
On the bright side, I don’t seem to be as overtrained as I was, and I didn’t have to shut everything down to do it. Maybe I should always half-ass everything 🙂