Turning Around a Crappy Workout Session  

An intense work schedule and a tight project deadline this week resulted in a drastic drop off in my activity level. This made for a tough masters workout last night.

I didn’t feel terrible. I was rested, and energetic, and ready to go, but in the water, I felt out of place. The water felt light, and I had a hard time grabbing it on the catch.

The positive, was that my flip turns felt awesome, and I was determined to slug my way through it. I just kept hammering away at my laps, and tried to concentrate on body position, catch, and turns.

The main set was 6 x 200m descending. When I do a set like this, I try to start with a slow relaxed pace. Then I try to work on improving just one thing on each upcoming 200 like a quick turn, or a hard push off the wall, until I reach normal pace about half way through the set. Then on the last couple I try to gut it out and swim hard, and descend my times with pure effort.

As I eased into last nights set, I started to feel better and better. I was speeding up in relation to the others in my lane until on the last two, I was feeling good and swimming fast, and doing my flip turns.

At the end of the session I had comments from one of my lane mates as well as the coach on how good my turns looked. And that made it all worth it.

So the takeaway message is when you find you are not having a great workout, find something to focus on and battle through. In the end you will feel great for not quitting.