Scheduling Workouts is an Art

Scheduling workouts is an art that I have yet to master. I view this as a positive and a negative.

Positive: I want to produce different/improved racing results. To do so, I have to train differently than I have in the past. Feeling like I am out of my comfort zone and needing to re-think the scheduling of my workouts is an indication that I am in fact pushing and moving into uncharted territory.

Negative: To get the most out of every workout, I need to be fresh and charge each and every workout appropriately (hard stuff real hard and easy stuff real easy). With new workouts on my plan that I didn't do in the first half of the season coupled with simply moving into a more difficult phase of training my workouts haven't been balance appropriately and I have not been able to complete some workouts as spec'd. No bueno.

No biggee. Eyes wide open. I will get it fixed.

Two main reasons I got to this point:
1) I typically swim 3-4x/wk. To fit everything in this week, I have done three days in a row of swimming that have left my arms/shoulders noticeably fatigued. Form, gone. Ability to hold moderate/prescribed pace, gone. I started to fall apart during a set of 800s at race pace yesterday. Today during a set of 10x200s, I fell apart 1/2 way through the workout. Some of this "melt down" had to do with muscle fatigue and some had to do with #2 below....

2) This morning, I did my first track workout of the year. Crazy, huh? Well, refer back to my comment about doing things differently....I have to get faster. I did a main set of 5x1200 at 5k race pace. Yuck, ouch, puke and some other four-letter words. I simply have not done any real speed work in so long and my body and mind just had no idea what to do. The first three intervals were on target although very uncomfortable (to me there is a difference between very hard and uncomfortable), but the final two were significantly off pace :09 and :13 seconds off respectively. This workout left me tired for hours...I usually recover pretty quickly, but even 5 hrs later, I was still feeling it.

Bottom line....anaerobic endurance set on the track followed by a tough muscle endurance set in the pool on fatigued upper body = the need to take a look at how my workouts are scheduled.

Doing 2-3 sports a day doesn't leave much room to wiggle.