Mental demons in the pool

Just a quick post tonight. So my triathlon season ended after I completed an olympic at the end of July, I was hoping to go to IMMT and then do the Pumpkinman sprint but the hip and lower back said no. I am on the mend with some great people and we are working on getting me back on the bike which should be next week. In the meantime I am running and swimming, and swimming, and swimming. The running is good and getting better ( I think, right Pat?). I'm running without pain and unfortunately not doing much speed but at least I can get in a lot of zone 1 work with a little zone 2. I have a 1/2 marathon coming up and then a full in November as long as things stay the path they have been going. I'm excited to run a marathon, I've only run one in my life, Chicago in 1999 in a whopping 4hr 56 minutes. I don't count my ironman marathons since I literaly walked both of them.

The swimming is keeping my aerobic base high since I can't bike, but its so hard when your not doing a triathlon to push hard on the swim. I spend a ton of time during my sets saying to myself, " oh, just go easy, its september, you don't need to push right now, you don't have a race", its brutal, I spend the whole set bitching to myself about why I'm working hard, but then I do it and I'm happy about it in the end. But I tell you, I spend a good 5 minutes in the hot shower before going out to the pool contemplating my swim set and getting nervous. I never do this with my runs or bikes.

 Which brings me to today, the miles of misery, a good swift warm up and then 2 x 1600 with 2 minute recovery in between. The goal is not to go slower on the second and to hold a good pace. I always think I can go faster, or should i say I wish I could go faster than I do. I did a poor job on the first one, landing at the wall in 25 minutes flat. I was like, " what, that sucked, WTF", then I only had 2 minutes to rest and it was time to go again. Now during this last 1600 I had to convince myself to swim hard to hold pace to not give up to believe in myself that it was going to make a difference even though I wasn't doing a triathlon for another few months, it was crazy stupid, I was more mentally exhausted at the end of the set then I was physically. 24:56, awful, suck, suck, suck, suck, suck.

I think if I stop talking to myself when I swim I might swim faster. What the hell Donna, get a grip. My goal is to get in the low 24's on both 1600's we'll see how that goes by the end of the season.