Time to Grind Off that Rust

Wow…It’s time to get back to racing. I haven’t been on the blocks since July at the 2009 World Championships in Rome. For those of you who have not been around ‘racing’ sports that’s a pretty long time to be out of the racing world. This is not necessarily a bad thing but simply the training path I took in order to focus more on hitting the weights and water workouts really hard. However, it showed yesterday in the 50 free and today in the 200 free that my racing skills are a bit dull. The strange thing is that I felt good in the warm-up for both events. This once again proves that it doesn’t matter how we feel. As you may have already guessed I’m super tired from all the training I’ve been doing lately. This past Saturday I lifted weights for two hours and am definitely still seeing the effects of that. In short, I’ve been training like a mad man. Speed is not going to be there for me right now. Although it is very frustrating to swim slow and get beat by many people, I must remain poised and believe I’m doing the right thing in my training.

Kris Kubik, our famed assistant coach at Texas put it to me like this last night, “As long as you are doing the best you can do, then you are doing the best you can do! Sounds like you are!!!” This rings true. As always I’m giving every race my all. I must remain focused on learning from everything I’m doing and continue to have faith.