It wasn’t a particularly hard day or anything, but I was stuck at my desk all day, and perhaps as a result, my back hurt by the time I got home. I’d already decided to swim, though, and with Sally and the girls out for the evening, I stuck to the plan and headed for the pool.
I felt alright in the water, but I didn’t particularly want to be there. I wasn’t mentally engaged, I just happened to be swimming decently. I’d planned to do 200s, and in an effort to fix my engagement problem, I decided to try to negative-split them while holding 2:30. It’s physically and mentally challenging to manage both those things simultaneously, so I figured that would at least keep my brain engaged.
Yeah, that’s a stupid swimmers’ trick, I know. It also works.
Anyway, my workout wound up looking like this:
Warm-Up:
2 x 200 @ 3:00 easy
200 kick
5 x 200 swim @ 2:55
-- holding 2:30
-- negative splitting by 100s
3 x 200 pull @ 3:00
50 warm down
My first 200 of the main set was 2:25, and I kept the next three just under 2:30, splitting something like 1:15/1:14 with consistency. But I must have been working harder than I realized because I cracked hard on the last 200 swim, and after that, it was all I could do just to keep my arms turning over. It hurt *a lot*, and suddenly all my apathy about getting in the water in the first place came rushing back. I managed to gut out the last three 200s pull, but my shoulders were sore afterwards, and my back was really sore when I got home.
Ugh.
This is what I hate about getting older. It’s not that I can or can’t do what I want to do, it’s that even little training mistakes can stick with me for hours afterwards. It just takes so damned long to recover anymore.
Sally rubbed some heating gel on my back, and I would eventually sleep pretty well, but I can still feel that workout in my shoulders. It’s like the ghost of remembered pain haunting me this morning.
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