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Today was a good day. A very good day.

Since Jeff left for vacation I haven’t been able to get through an entire workout that he wrote out for me. I’ve gotten through half. I’ve done about two-thirds. But I’ve been upset about not getting through an entire workout. Today I changed up my schedule so that I’d go to the pool during the middle of the day when most people are at work, and hope that meant there’d be fewer people in the pool and I’d be able to get through a whole workout.

It worked.

After getting some good news during the day (this may be my own personal blog, but I’m not going 100-percent personal on here, sorry), I felt like I wanted to keep that uplifting feeling going throughout the day.

So even though I felt very tired after a 10×50 swim warm up. And a 10×25 swim with paddles. And a 200 fly kick with fins. And a 300 swim with paddles. And a 10×25 kick fast. I pushed through it on my final 300 swim, with fins and paddles. And I told myself not to stop even if I wanted to.

I didn’t.

And then I kept going. 10×25 kick again. And finally, 6×50 swim, easy swims on the odds, fast on the evens. And even as I was dead tired, I looked up at the clock for my final 50 meters and told myself I was going to approach it as a 100 — after short rest from the easy 50, I was going to knock out the next 50 in less than 40 seconds to prove to myself that these 26-second final 25s in my 100 races were beatable. I wanted to prove to myself that I could use the things I’ve learned over the last week to combat them.

I came in in 36 seconds.

It felt good. Not because it was a blazing fast 50. I’ve gone faster. And pretty much any swimmer in this area does that in their sleep. It felt good because I did it even though I was incredibly tired,  I did it without Jeff there pushing me, and I had finally finished an entire workout sheet.

These are the little satisfactions that make the big accomplishments feel better. It’s such a small occurrence, such a tiny accomplishment, but it was important to me to get it done and prove I could push through a workout even without Jeff there.

This is a shorter blog today because I’ve had so much going on and I had to live chat during the USA-Mexico World Cup qualifier.

I promise tomorrow morning to knock out a decent-sized blog before heading out to Baltimore. In it, I’ll chronicle some dry-land stuff. I want to start focusing more and more on abs as I go deeper into the workout.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Diving Back In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.