Craptastic

Today I had a spectacularly bad swim. If I swore on this blog (which I do not because I know my mother reads it), I would have several choice words to use as descriptors. When I woke up this AM feeling tired and less than 100% (but really, who feels 100% at 4:55am?), a little voice inside my head said, "you should just go back to bed now." At the time, it sounded like the voice of laziness talking. But partway through a really ugly 1600, when I was on the verge of getting lapped (okay, I did get lapped, whatever), it sounded like the voice of reason. The arms wouldn't turn over, the legs felt like dead weight, I felt like I was working hard but going nowhere fast. I don't think I could've kept up if I had a jetpack strapped to the back of my Splish. THAT is how slow I felt. After the relative success I've had with swimming the past few months, this was a little slap in the face.

At the end of practice, I got out of the pool and wanted to take a nap. My brain immediately started thinking, "you're overtired, you just need a break, you should TOTALLY skip that scheduled run and use that time to rest up for camp instead." Now I was all ears to the voice of reason. During my commute to work, I grabbed the trusty iPhone and tapped out a frantic e-mail to Jen, trying to make my swim workout sound as pathetic and sad as possible, hoping she'd respond back with - "yup, you are tired, you should take the rest of the day off and eat bon-bons." Of course she actually said nothing of the sort, providing me with no excuse to skip my run. This is all made more awesome by the fact that the run was about 20-25 minutes longer than I had thought it would be and included intervals. Oh the drama. I cajoled myself onto the treadmill, saying I didn't have to do the whole workout, I didn't have to do intervals if I didn't want to, if I felt crummy, I could get off in 30 minutes, blah, blah, blah. Wouldn't you know, once I started running, it didn't feel so bad. My warmup came and went, the intervals started (a little slow at first, but eventually I stopped being a wussy sandbagger), the intervals finished, and the whole 70 minutes of the workout were suddenly over. I still wanted a nap, but I felt decent about my run and I was glad I didn't make excuses to skip it. The decent run workout semi-canceled out the craptastic swim (or at least gave me something else to think about). And really, when have you ever gone for a swim, bike, or run that you regretted later? I think the only regrets are for those workouts that you skip. I'll make sure I tell myself that next time I am tempted to skip out.