Not such a good swim

Tonight I made it back to the pool with the team. I was hoping it would go as well as last time but it didn't quite happen like that. We started with a warm up and then a few drills. During the open water swim I took a breath with each stroke and I found myself doing the same tonight. Its much more difficult to get into a rhythm this way. I didn't find myself getting into the appropriate position.

Then with the team they wanted us to swim with our heads out of the water. The purpose was to practice what it would feel like as you tried to spot the buoy. All this time I've been working on keeping my head down and now they wanted me to go back to the way I started. It felt ironic.

I almost thought I would have an advantage since this was how I'd always swam but turned out I couldn't swim as well as I once had looking ahead. After several laps of swimming with my head above water poorly we started doing sprints. I really hated the sprints. I was the slowest person on my relay team and that never makes me feel good.

Then we had about twenty minutes left. They decided to have us snake the lanes. This is where you swim down one lane, up the next lane over, repeatedly until you get to the end of the pool, where you jump out and start at the first lane again. I snaked the pool about 4 times. Your swimming with everyone at the same time so you get kicked, splashed on, I was breathing every stroke, and really doing poorly. I guess that is how some workouts go. There is only a 1.5 weeks of training left.

The coaches asked us to do some mental exercises for the race. "If you believe you can do it, then you can. If you don't then you will not make it." We are supposed to mentally play through the race every night from now on. I'm having trouble with the swim portion tonight...