I just had a blissful workout.

Carmody is closed so I went to Green Mountain. I planned to focus on keeping my stroke relaxed. After swimming the first 8 x 100m, I decided that I felt good and I wanted to see how it felt to pick up my stroke rate some. As it turns out, I was adjusting the rate in the wrong direction. I had dropped the Tempo Trainer a while back and the display does not show the numbers properly any more. When I got home I timed it and I had actually slowed the tempo down to 1.36 seconds per stroke. I know that on my last repeat I was definitely choosing to maintain a higher stroke rate than the trainer was beeping. I had also added one or two additional 100 repeats because I was feeling so good and had a sense of much better flow and rhythm. I don't know how I would have improved the catch and pull and decreased the dead spot by swimming at at lower stroke rate. I think it must have been psychological. I have reset the trainer to 1.25 seconds per stroke. I'll see how it goes on Friday. I'm confident that I can still maintain the relaxed feel and the nice flow since I had started the workout at 1.27 seconds per stroke for the first 8 X 100m.

The weather was great for the run. I maintained a nice easy pace and really just enjoyed being outside. I was supposed to run 30 minutes. I ended up running for almost 40 minutes.

It's been such a long time since I've had a workout experience like this. I hope that I've turned the corner and I'm headed back to the way workouts used to be for me.