Okay, I'm in a complete funk now. At spring nationals this weekend, I had what was probably the worst meet of my career, performance wise. Really can't understand why, as the meet was run really well, I thought I had trained and tapered properly, and everything seemed to be in order. Come competition time, I sucked. Had a so-so 400IM, got dq'd in the 200Br, and just went slow in everything else. Not making excuses, but now I feel horrible. Don't want to train, and I'm almost embarrassed to look at my results.
So now what? How do I get over this desire to quit?
(I know, I'm taking this way to seriously, but I can't shake the feeling of being a failure)
I can't shake the feeling of being a failure
We've all been there and have our own ways to get through it. I will spare you the psychological pep talk because they rarely help with coping for me.
Its very easy to look at a time as a whole and feel that your training was for nothing. However, for all my failed races I found it a lot more revealing and comforting to hyper analyze not why I was swimming so slow, but where I wasted the time in my races. Every race starts off perfection, and then you make some mistakes or missteps. If you're realistic about what a perfect race is going to be on a given day, its usually pretty easy (and surprisingly accurate) to account for where the time went, and when you can lay the reasons out there its a little easier to cope with a failed performance. The hard part is probably being being realistic and estimating what that race picture looks like to get a base time goal that you are happy with.
Ex: in my tapered LCM 50 last year I drifted over to the side of the lane and stupidly corrected back to middle. I actually did the trig to calculate an approximate length I swam further than 50m because of the deviation, and doing so had fully accounted for the missing tenths in my race. This actually did make me happier, because the speed and the race was still there beneath the mistake, the training hadn't failed after all. (I could then move on to beating myself up over the mistake and not on a failed season of training, lol )
It doesn't mean this method will always prove it was a race mistake, but it'd make sense to at least not feel bad about training if it didn't really contribute to the disappointing time you saw.
I should also note, that after applying this to every important swim I can remember, I can only count on one hand the ones where I feel I did it all correctly and went my expected peak time... and they largely weren't even on my PB swims ;)
I can't shake the feeling of being a failure
We've all been there and have our own ways to get through it. I will spare you the psychological pep talk because they rarely help with coping for me.
Its very easy to look at a time as a whole and feel that your training was for nothing. However, for all my failed races I found it a lot more revealing and comforting to hyper analyze not why I was swimming so slow, but where I wasted the time in my races. Every race starts off perfection, and then you make some mistakes or missteps. If you're realistic about what a perfect race is going to be on a given day, its usually pretty easy (and surprisingly accurate) to account for where the time went, and when you can lay the reasons out there its a little easier to cope with a failed performance. The hard part is probably being being realistic and estimating what that race picture looks like to get a base time goal that you are happy with.
Ex: in my tapered LCM 50 last year I drifted over to the side of the lane and stupidly corrected back to middle. I actually did the trig to calculate an approximate length I swam further than 50m because of the deviation, and doing so had fully accounted for the missing tenths in my race. This actually did make me happier, because the speed and the race was still there beneath the mistake, the training hadn't failed after all. (I could then move on to beating myself up over the mistake and not on a failed season of training, lol )
It doesn't mean this method will always prove it was a race mistake, but it'd make sense to at least not feel bad about training if it didn't really contribute to the disappointing time you saw.
I should also note, that after applying this to every important swim I can remember, I can only count on one hand the ones where I feel I did it all correctly and went my expected peak time... and they largely weren't even on my PB swims ;)
