Inspired by song

Sometimes, you feel like shit.
Sometimes that ain't half of it.
"The Company I Keep", Drive By Truckers

This was not a good morning, and truth be told, I have no idea what happened. Sure, I ran pretty hard last night, but I think I got plenty of recovery food, and a decent night's sleep, and ate my usual breakfast. But I sucked in the water today. I got caught in the wake of the Fail Boat, and had one of those days that makes you re-think if you should even bother doing this sport.

(Luckily, I've been in the game long enough to know that bad training days are just that, they happen to everyone, and sometimes they happen for no explicable reason. Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern. So don't expect any retirement notices here, but I'll admit to wondering if I should switch to duathlon during the set.)

I felt good getting into the water, felt good warming up. Then the real work started, and I was crushed. The heart of the workout was 6x300m with one minute rest, hard and self-timed. The goal was to do the work, and try not to experience too much drop-off. Given that I did a 400m TT in 7:00 in January, I thought repeats at 5:30 (1:50/100) would be a more than reasonable goal. I was way off. Part of it must be my pacing, because I could hit 1:40-:45 for the first hundred with no problems, but things just crashed after that. I finished my first interval in 5:27, and fought to get that. It should have been a cruise. The times only went up from there, until the last rep, when I completely sold out to make a respectable time. I was even getting extra rest, since I had to let the others in my lane move in front of me as I cannonballed to the back of the lane. This was a pretty depressing run. I feel like I'm caught between two swimming forms, and my body isn't strong enough to keep form with my new technique, but I've lost the ability to generate any speed with the old technique. I could feel myself not finishing my stroke, and any attempt to get a better roll felt like a fish floundering on land. I guess I need to keep building the muscular endurance to keep this up over longer stretches. Long-term, this is the right way to do it, but having sucky days like this sucks. (Yay redundancy!)

Swim: w/u - 200m each free, non-free, pull
4x50 free, descending, 15"
6x300 free, 1' (5:27, 5:35, 5:32, 5:45, 5:50, 5:37)
500 ez, as 100 each back/breast/pull/back/breast
2x200 pull w/paddles, 30"
c/d: 100 non-free, 100 ez free
Total: 3500m