Almost walked out

Another day being the outcast.  Today was a race pace day.  An entire practice dedicated to elevating yourself to the effort and speed we will experience during a race.  The only space available to me was in the diving well.  Let me explain my training setup for today:

• I'm in the warm diving well, warm water makes you swim slower because your body heat maxes out quicker.  Makes you feel lethargic
• The lights are off above the diving well and yet turning on 50+ 400w metal halide bulbs hardly seems like a worthwhile investment in my 2 hour practice.  Therefore I'm training in dim lighting, more annoying than unworkable
• No backstroke flags.  I'm a backstroker, I need to know where the wall is.  A quick workaround I've frequently used is to just look for the pole which the flags are hung from.  Unfortunately the poles were missing today.  Therefore I need to swim an alternate stroke.
• I'm away from the team and coaches, nobody to motivate me or push me in any way.  I have to keep track of my own intervals and times.  Because of my placement in the pool area, I have a limited view of the pace clocks.

As usual, all of these situations have nothing to do with the coaches.  At this point even letting me train honestly seems like they're doing me a favor.  So to recap, I'm in a warm diving well with no lights, no lanelines, no flags, no other swimmers, no coaches and nobody timing me. I try to be positive but shortly after I enumerated all the distractions and negative points of today's training situation, I packed up my equipment bag and put it away.  I walked over to the head coach and let him know I though it would be better if I just came in alone sometime tomorrow (sunday).  He disagreed and urged me to stay and do the workout.  I agreed, grabbed my bag and did the workout alone, again.

Today I found some strength in totally ignoring the team during the workout.  While swimming I had to go out of my way to view the team. The water level in relation to the deck requires me to lift myself out of the water to check what is happening in the other pool.  I decided that rather than try to check where the rest of the guys were during the practice, I would swim entirely at my own pace.  This had it's benefits and also it's negative points.  I found that I could do the harder workout (Middle Distance) and add a little more rest in since I was doing it backstroke and butterfly, yet I knew I was not pushing it as hard as I would have been if I had been part of the group.  In the end I did get a great workout but still found myself very discouraged about my situation.

I'm very sore from weights and an ab workout I created for myself.  I also did about 5 minutes of a hip flexer workout that a guy who trained with the Navy Seals taught me.  I just demolished my hip flexers, it's really quite painful, which clearly means I need to do it more often!  If this horrible training situation has taught me anything it is to become more organized regarding my own workouts.  To me, that means beginning to gather all the best parts of what I've learned from CW as well as my favorite sets from high school and college.  I know I can train myself well, and although I don't want to, it's really looking like that might be my best option in the immediate future.  I'm looking into options, but I will leverage my own training experience to get through this.