Not my best day

I'm run down.  It's been yet another long week.  I didn't do anything today I would consider impressive in the pool.  This morning we ended our workout with another 50m all out swim with full equipment (fins/paddles).  In the last few days I swam a 23.7 and a 23.0, both great times.  Today I had on smaller paddles, and admittedly, my effort level was lower, I just wasn't motivated to go fast.  I touched in a 23.9 but I promise you that was a generous split.  I can't imagine it was a 23 second swim.

This morning was an IN/OUT workout.  Meaning we swam for 30 minutes, then went upstairs to do dryland for 30 minutes and repeated that process twice.  We boxed and did an ab workout while we weren't swimming.  It was a challenging morning.

This evening wasn't much different.  I was just in slow motion.  Luckly Coach Mark Hill worked with me on my backstroke body position for a while and I actually got something out of an otherwise difficult/boring workout.  Tonight we tried the "AvidaSport" performance monitoring system again.  It consists of 5 modules you strap to your body, one on each wrist, one on each ankle and one on the top of your head (under a cap).  The head mounted one has an earpiece to give you feedback on your rates.  It will tell you verbally how fast you are moving your arms and legs.  The information is relayed wirelessly to a tablet PC the coach is holding which tells him how everybody is swimming.  The MD group uses them much more than sprinters do.  We've tried these 3 times now. Last two times around I couldn't get mine to work correctly.  The system as a whole has been an annoying part of practice.  It takes 20 minutes to get it all strapped together, only for there to be a technical problem which reduces the experience to us simply wearing a bunch of stuff on our bodies with no benefit.  Today was no different at all.  50 guys all put them on and not a single one got any feedback from the system.  I'm not sure I'll ever try the system out again, it just seems like wasted time.  The swimmers agree, it's a FANTASTIC system in theory but we cannot get the darn thing to work, even with two AvidaSport employees on site.  AvidaSport, PLEASE fix this, it's a truly revolutionary concept!

And of course I had to make a crack at the end of practice which raised the concern that perhaps the system wasn't waterproof :)